Maduro gone … Now what? … Back on the interventionist road in Venezuela and elsewhere?
Well, one shoe has dropped in Venezuela, and the military personnel who conducted the operation executed a job that was very well done. In this evolving story, though, we still have a number of throw backs to the dangers that hide in any act of American interventionism. The first we are already hearing about; namely, who is going to rule in Caracas? A new regime did not succeed the other there in any comprehensive and reliable sense, and there are no Americans who have enough knowledge of the region to help make a new government work and, in any event, one must doubt whether the Venezuelans will be content with a successor regime that carries a made-by-USA trademark. And as our two guests tonight – Brandon Waechter and Luis Quinonez – said the politicians that likely will form the new government are in many ways more politically ideological, on the socialist/communist side, than were their predecessors.
We also have learned that we are now engaged not only in anti-narcotics struggle, but in a battle to control Venezuela’s vast oil resources, but first Americans have to pay for the compete rebuilding of the country’s oil-harvesting infrastructure. Last Friday’s well-staged meeting with the leading U.S. oil executives and President Trump seemed to have left the Venezuelans to watch American businessman restore the country’s oil sector. Finding smiling U.S. oil executives at a meeting with the President of the day always makes me reach for my wallet and try to hide it from the administration’s next step, which in our history is always tax breaks, incentive payments, and most any other method that can be constructed to make sure the taxpayers – especially folks cooking breakfast at the Waffle house of pouring coffee at Dunkin’ – pay the freight for the oil industry’s eager willingness to “help America”. Maybe Trump et. al. can design a program where Big Oil can step into the same ring with those other lovers of the working man and woman, Big Pharma, Israel, NATO. and the U.S. Arms industry,
–The whole Venezuela drama, perhaps helpfully, raises the question how to deal with those leaders who the president-of-the-day defines as lethal threats to U.S. national security. While the U.S. military is reported to have suffered no deaths in the Venezuela operations, that is a rare, almost unheard of event in scarlet-hued history of American interventionism – the key adjectives for which are bloody, costly, and failed. If a new pro-U.S. Venezuelan regime, and acceptable democratic government – even if the latter is a clear farce – does not fall magically in place, the odds are that Trump’s government will not walk away from its predictable failure, but will redouble efforts to succeed, if only because the Republicans in the Congress and Senate are pro-war, come rain or come shine. The same goes for the Democrats, but their motivation is less war- love, than it is a chance to fake being patriots and to set the stage for industrial-level thieving from a ridiculously bloated war-time defense budget. If a Venezuela war comes, the American military’s blood will flow, whatever is left of the treasury will be drained, taxes will go up, as will back-door monetary support for Israel, and civil liberties will be further constricted. Although Americans are urged by a variety of sources to stay loyal to the “plan” the plan sketched above is the plan that has been best loved since 1945. It has never delivered peace and democracy, it only delivers death, a new herd of incompetent Flag Officers, and another step toward what is looks like the approaching demise of the republic.
Finally, a few more words on an issue that has bedeviled me since I went to work with for CIA in 1982 and entered into a government-wide culture that is comfortable at following presidential orders and support unconstitutional and unnecessary interventionist wars that are always lost and only succeed in expending the lives of America’s sons and daughters, wasting vast economic resources, and killing much of the population of the country picked for military intervention, most often because U.S. leaders dislike the leader of the country designated for attack.
Now, the business of war is killing; most simply put by the magnificent Confederate Cavalry Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who said “war means fighting and fighting means killing.” Now, Forrest’s statement is factual, clear, and irrefutable. But over my CIA career and since, I have seen – in every interventionist war – of which there have been a ton — that the enemy of America always seem to be defined not as a country or a group, but as an individual leader: Saddam, Mullah Omar, Gadhafi, Osama bin Laden, Noriega, Putin, Zi, Castro, the Ortega brothers, and multiple Ayatollahs for starters. Once U.S. leaders begin to speak of going to war against an enemy who is a person and not a country, the gates of hell blow wide open. Whenever a country is unfortunate enough to have its leader designated by a U.S. administration as a dire threat to U.S. national security, you can bet on three-sure things: (1.) the country of the leader is going to suffer massive human casualties and thoroughly ravaged infrastructure, (2.) the U.S. military will suffer heavy casualties among its troops, there will be the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and the mentally harmed. Likewise, the economic expense of the war will be grotesque, as will the level of payoffs quietly conveyed to the members of Congress from the arms makers, and (3.) there will be no democratic political system in the country that got smashed to pieces because of U.S. and western dislike of its leader.
Finally, a question about the above. Why have the reputedly mature and well-educated men and women who have been elected to the presidency and Congress since 1945 fought so many unnecessary and counterproductive interventionist wars since? Well, the answer is mainly because American politicians in both parties love to wage war, but are unwilling to offend what they falsely describe as the world’s common values, which are really only the values of the far left, fascists, and globalists. The American president, government, military, and intelligence community are hobbled by an utterly mad and cowardly “respect” for international norms which have no contact point with commonsense. The only norms that America and Americans are bound to respect are those norms and commonsense that are grounded in America’s experience and traditions. Those norms include in the sector of war, refusing to get involved in other people’s wars, refusing to go to war based on sympathy for another country or for reasons that are easily understood as ill-thought-through efforts to improve the U.S. economy; the eternally smart ignoring rhetoric that defames the United States and go about the nation’s business; never elect politicians who speak positively of the glories of the post-1945 international community, the essential role played by the UN; and the absolute necessity of half-assed alliances like the NATO Treaty, all of which have been used to force the U.S. to go to war for a depraved and authoritarian Western Europe without the approval of Congress; lastly to never deal with any Globalists; these are people upon which intelligence communities should be targeted to destroy as aggressively and quickly as possible
If America can get the heads of its political leaders screwed on correctly in terms of acting internationally only if the there is a genuine threat to the U.S., of which there have been none since the end of the Cold War, save for that of China — which was only possible because of the willingness of America’s industrialists to abandon the United States for the Orient, and a braindead Congress and multiple presidents that allowed China to become a member of the World Trade Association – and Russia, which is a notable threat today because of the Biden administration’s widespread traitorousness that got the republic neck-deep in an war between Russia and Ukraine, which has never been a serious national threat to America until until Democrats, Republicans, State Department officials, intelligence officers, military leaders, and politicians found that they could make fortunes off the blood of others, and displayed their lust for lucre by stealing a good deal of the money wasted on Zelensky’s criminal government and convincing many terminally stupid Americans that Ukraine was worth anything more than a bucket of spit.
Interventionism is among the deadliest threats to the survival of the American republic. The trail back toward the nirvana of General Washington’s idea of America First lies in abandoning the dufus idea that single individual leaders of Third World rat holes are a credible threat to the survival and liberty of the United States and its people. When such made-for-war-lovers foreign leaders appear on the international scene, and if we have a presidential administration that believes the threat he or she poses is serious, we must send a team of Marine snipers to infiltrate the country and kill the bastard. In so doing, a lot of shit-bird leaders from foreign governments will moan and cry, NGOs will weep and damn the president, and America-hating European governments and the Vatican will announce their hate for American nationalism. All of that is just noise and even amusing as many of these countries cannot defend themselves or survive economically without the United States. For Americans who would join or agree with these weeping critics, I would simply ask is the life of a Saddam, a Mullah Omar, or an Osama Bin Laden anywhere near worth the life of one U.S. Marine, soldier, aviator, or sailor – especially if he was your child — let alone the 10,000 American military personnel killed going after Saddam in Iraq and Mullah Omar and Bin Laden in Afghanistan? The answer cannot be anything but no. And you can take it from me, there is no world leader that can prevent an American sniping team from success. We could, for example, have killed or captured Bin Laden almost any time after the spring of 1997. Why didn’t we? Because CIA leaders, American presidents, and other political leaders either feared the world media damning them if they succeeded or failed, and so never let its intelligence or military forces to give it a go. When thinking about this, doesn’t almost seem that there must have been another reason that Bin Laden’s life was spared just long enough to allow the 9/11 raids to be planned and executed and thereby make him expendable?
