This morning the United States attacked Venezuela and captured Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife. It is believe they are on their way to the United States to face charges related to drug trafficking. I have deleted a previous post about the Venezuelan situation.
I am not at all sad about the departure of Maduro. He had driven the country into poverty to enrich himself and his followers. The question is what happens to Venezuela now? When we took out Saddam Hussain, far worse things (ISIS) arose in the aftermath.
I doubt we would have done this were it not for Venezuelan oil, the largest undeveloped reserves in the world. Drug trafficking, a very serious problem, could have been addressed through aggressive drug interdiction and I don’t think capturing Maduro will stop drug trafficking. As I mentioned before, we don’t need to be murdering non-combatants on the ocean. There are many non-lethal ways to stop and capture these boats.
Now, 24 hours later some things are clear. The Maduro regime, his loyalists, are still running the country. Maduro himself was kidnapped but there is no U.S. military on the ground in Venezuela. Trump’s statement that we would be running the country and rebuilding the oil infrastructure cannot happen without a full scale invasion and maybe not then. Completely missing from the U.S. narrative is any call for a free and fair election in Venezuela and restoration of democracy in that country. The people of Venezuela do not matter. Democracy does not matter, somehow Trump or those controlling him think they can get the oil. I believe it was first and foremost about the oil.
