DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN?
The administration’s action in Venezuela isn’t the same old thing all over again. It’s worse.
The administration’s dramatic actions in Venezuela have triggered memories of earlier misguided efforts to overthrow unjust regimes and remake Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua, Panama, Lebanon, Libya, Iran and so on.
As Daily Show comedian Jon Stewart observed,
some similarities between Iraq and Venezuela are unavoidable. Two authoritarian rulers sitting on large oil reserves. Inflated or imaginary fears about the threat to the United States. Deliberate misstatements and outright lies about aluminum tubes and fentanyl. Weak internal and congressional guardrails.
Some profound differences are equally obvious. Bush rallied the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His current successor has divided the nation, triggered tremors in his own base, lost popular support and raised growing concerns about the condition of his prefrontal cortex.
Bush quickly assembled international support for his misguided Mideast mission. On Substack, the journalist Anne Applebaum aptly described his successor’s excuse for a national security strategy as “the longest suicide note in American history”.
The most significant and troubling difference between earlier misadventures, including those in Nicaragua, Panama, Lebanon, Libya and, way back, Iran in 1953, however, lies not in how the U.S. acted, but in why.
For all their arrogance, ambition, ignorance and incompetence, the President’s predecessors thought they were acting in the best interest of the United States and their target countries.
After retaliating against al Qaeda and its hosts for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the second Bush administration thought it could lift Afghanistan out of the 10th Century and its women out of the grip of the Taliban.
In Iraq, a neoconservative think tank, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their small circle of friends thought they could readily replace Saddam Hussein with a democratic regime that would be a beacon for the Arab world and a friend to Israel, or at least a peaceable neighbor. Neither Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi’s mumblings about reopening a pipeline from Iraq’s oil fields to the Israeli port of Haifa nor the prospect of lucrative oil service contracts played significant roles in the discussions, according to participants at the time.
True, in neither case did the findings, assessments and warnings of veteran intelligence, military and Foreign Service officers steer U.S. policy. Like its predecessor, the current administration prefers lecturing to listening, according to multiple current officials who have self-censored red flags about Venezuela, had them ignored or retired preemptively.
In the end, though, this President is more an actor than a policymaker, so what were his motives in this act? There is his eternal quest to make himself look bigger by surrounding himself with small faces, expanding presidential power, making audacious statements and taking audacious actions. If those distract from afflictions such as health care costs and the remaining 5.2 million pages of Epstein files, what a happy coincidence.
More important, he made it clear Saturday that the stability and governance of Venezuela and the security and wellbeing of its people have not played much part in his administration’s calculations, much less what passed for planning. The U.S., he said, is “going to run the country” until there can be a “safe, proper and judicious” transition, presumably as defined in Washington, not Caracas.
However, it appears that his apparent choice to run the country on behalf of the United States in the meantime, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who has no greater legitimacy than ousted President Nicolas Maduro did, failed to receive her orders or else chose to ignore them. She called the American action “shameful” and demanded the release of Maduro and his wife Celia Flores.
The administration, though, already had dismissed opposition leader Marina Corina Machado as “a very nice woman” who lacks the support and respect needed, an assessment not universally shared. A cynic might wonder if the real reason is that she has a Nobel Peace Prize and the President does not.
Nor, if the administration has anything resembling a foreign policy, are its actions in Venezuela consistent with what officials say it is, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of the President’s remaining America First supporters observed almost immediately.
As for the claim that Venezuela’s fentanyl trade was a clear and present danger to the U.S., what remains of the news media did a better job of debunking that than its predecessors did with bogus claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and support for al Qaeda.
It also is not clear how an action that risks stirring violent unrest in Venezuela, even if National Guard units are not reassigned from Chicago to Caracas, will discourage more people from Venezuela and Colombia from trying the long trek north.
So if securing democracy and stability in Venezuela, avoiding foreign entanglements, securing America’s southern border and shutting down nonexistent fentanyl trafficking are not the administration’s motives, what are?
Vice President J.D. Vance might have edged closer to reality when he called Venezuela’s oil “stolen” and said it “must be returned to the United States”.
His boss made that clear when he pledged to have “our very largest American oil companies” spend billions of dollars to repair the country’s “badly broken infrastructure”.
https://apple.news/TLZKrjVHNQX6EU84bXaUU4w
Gen. Laura Richardson, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, recently put it more bluntly, saying the administration’s policy is driven by oil and critical minerals, not a desire for democracy.
“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela and it also goes to the people of the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damage caused us by that country”.
He did not say how Venezuela’s vast oil wealth will be redistributed, but one can only hope the process will not resemble those used for granting presidential pardons, doling out aid or issuing federal contracts.
In the end, Venezuelan Vice President Rodriguez might have come closest to reality when she said the United States “only had one objective: regime change in Venezuela. And that this regime change allows them to capture our energy resources, mineral resources and natural resources.”
In the end, once again, the question about a transactional president’s latest transaction dates to the Roman consul Lucious Cassius: Cui bono?
Although the current administration’s motives differ from its predecessors’, one can only hope that an eternal truth does not reappear.
As the late, great war correspondent Joe Galloway put it: “When the government fucks up, the soldiers pay the price.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/22/why-did-we-invade-iraq/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592622/to-start-a-war-by-robert-draper/
https://www.ogj.com/home/article/17232358/oil-pipelines-played-role-in-us-invasion-of-iraq