Andrew Sage

We have attempted regime changes.

My career for the last several years has been reporting on the United States failed attempts to facilitate regime change all over the world, right?

It's not something we're very good at.

I don't think that the United States is going to invade.

Maybe you think differently, but I think we probably agree that the United States is unlikely to do an Iraq-style invasion of Venezuela.

Could you explain why, I suppose, just for people who think that that's what's happening in the Caribbean at the moment with this concentration of forces?

Well, it's unlikely to happen because Venezuela is a very large country and it would take a lot more troops than what are currently deployed, which is approaching 10,000 now.

But that's actually that includes all sorts of logistical support.

The actual fighting force, the Marine Expeditionary Unit is actually much smaller.

I lived in Panama as a kid, and I was not old enough to be there for the invasion, but I lived there some years after that.

That's probably the closest analog to this, at least the way that the Trump administration is promoting this, which is to say a regime change operation that is disguised as a counter-narcotics operation.

Famously, Noriega was... It was not a war.

It was an arrest of a foreign leader

who was indeed involved in drug trafficking.

And we knew that because he was literally a CIA asset whose drug trafficking was being protected as long as he was allied with the U.S.

against Cuban-backed rebel groups in Central America.

But at some point later, he became too much of an embarrassment for the U.S., was genuinely a brutal guy, pulled off the torture murder of Hugo Espada, all sorts of

nasty things.

But the big difference is at that time and when I lived there, the U.S.

had multiple military bases in Panama.