(Dobbs) Could Venezuela's Oil Become America’s Morass?We didn’t just take the Maduros into custody. We took Venezuela into custody.
So now that we have captured and arrested Nicolas Maduro, we’re going to “run” Venezuela.” Those were the words yesterday out of President Trump’s lips: “We’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place. We’re going to run it.” Maybe he should heed the words out of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lips in 2002 when he was trying to discourage President George W. Bush from invading Iraq and invoked what was known as the Pottery Barn rule: “You break it, you buy it.” We did invade, we did break it, and although more than 4,500 American troops gave their lives for the effort, it never really got fixed again. So while there are more differences than parallels between Iraq and Venezuela, we should not lose sight of one hard fact: when the United States has waged any kind of warfare to force regime change, it hasn’t always been welcomed with open arms. Even when citizens are glad to see a despot gone, they aren’t always kind to the foreign power that deposed him. It was true in Iraq and it could be true in Venezuela. As philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we are going to “run” Venezuela for any time at all, there will have to be American troops on the ground. Trump even said, “We are not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to.” Which could prove to be dangerous. I have reported from the slums of Caracas. The people there have been supported for many years— with food, with jobs, with housing— by Nicolas Maduro and before him, by his mentor Hugo Chavez. It is not inevitable but it also is not implausible that those people’s loyalty to Maduro will turn them into guerrilla fighters against our troops. What’s more, Trump said, “We’re going to make sure it’s run properly.” Since when, in modern times, has it been up to us to decide how a country is “run properly?” This can only open an international Pandora’s Box. How can we now protest anymore when other powers do the same thing we’re doing in Venezuela? How can we tell Communist China it can’t force regime change in democratic Taiwan when China insists that it isn’t “run properly?” Trump’s strike against Venezuela is a storm cloud of contradictions. • Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were indicted in New York almost six years ago on charges of narco-terrorism, and allegedly the purpose of this weekend’s overnight raid was to bring them to justice. Yet just last year, the ex-president of Honduras was not just indicted but convicted in the U.S. on very similar charges. The justice department said he had “conspired with some of the largest drug traffickers in the world to transport tons of cocaine through Honduras to the United States.” He was sentenced to 45 years in a federal penitentiary. But only a month ago, Donald Trump pardoned the man, calling him a victim of political persecution. • At Trump’s news conference after the raid on Caracas, when he was asked who would now run the country, he ruled out the leader of the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, saying, “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.” As if he actually has any way of knowing. Is it only a coincidence that just last month, Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize which Trump so covets? And is it true that now, when there’s a vacuum in a nation, we’re picking the winners and losers? I thought those dark days of gunboat diplomacy were over. • The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, said that the United States had gone to pains not only to minimize harm to civilians on the ground, but to ensure that the Maduros themselves would not suffer harm when they got captured so that they could face justice in the U.S. That’s a hundred-eight-degree turn from the strategy against alleged narco-traffickers traversing the seas off South America in their small boats who American forces have blown out of the water. So far, there have been around 35 strikes and at least 115 people killed, all without a shred of due process, all without any effort to “minimize harm” so that they could face justice in an American court. It’s a stark contrast to the Maduros, the targets of the raid in Caracas. • The administration did not brief Congress, as it is supposed to be obliged to do, until the Venezuelan incursion was underway. The excuse from Secretary of State Marco Rubio was, “It’s just not the kind of mission that you can pre-notify because it endangers the mission.” The implication was that the congressional leaders who should have been briefed, although they always have protected classified information critical to national security, might have leaked. That’s rich, since the most potentially perilous leak out of this administration so far came from the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, when he broadcast specific attack plans against Yemen from his personal phone on an app that anyone can buy off the shelf. • Every leader from the Trump regime has assured the American people when they were asked that we do not seek regime change in Venezuela and that our dispute with Maduro is only about drugs, not oil. That was nothing less than a lie. Trump spent the plurality of his news conference talking about Venezuela’s huge reserves of oil. He complained that Venezuela had expropriated and nationalized the American-run oil industry 50 years ago—maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but that was exactly 50 years ago last Thursday— and we have a right to put ourselves back in charge. Which is exactly what he intends to do. He told reporters that the U.S. would be taking control of oil production in Venezuela. Which could create new tensions with China, which imports most of the oil that Venezuela produces. But no, it’s not about oil. • It is widely accepted that under war powers legislation long ago passed by Congress, Trump had the legal authority under American law to stage the attacks in Venezuela, although there is room for debate about whether the authority ought to be broad enough to enable operations like this, when the whole rationale that we are at war with Venezuela is flimsy. But under international law, it’s a different story. The charter of the United Nations “prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” How does this Venezuelan incursion square with the objections of the West— with the occasional exception of the United States under Trump— to Russia’s illegal invasion of a sovereign Ukraine? After all is said and done though, the question isn’t just about America’s legal right to do this. It is about America’s moral right. This wouldn’t be the first time we question that. People questioned the morality of our atomic attacks on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, since some of President Harry Truman’s generals didn’t think they were necessary because we already were on the verge of victory. People questioned our moral right in Vietnam because our rationales kept changing. It was the same with Iraq. If we question the motive of a leader who on our behalf commits an act of war, we are fully entitled and absolutely right to make moral judgments about it. The questions today are, if we can do this with Venezuela and Maduro, can we do it anywhere with anyone? Do we want our nation to be flexing its muscles because it has to, or just because it wants to? Will what we’re doing in Venezuela help stabilize that uneasy nation, or make it more unstable than ever? Are we into nation-building again when we thought it was behind us? And it’s not only Venezuela. Just the day before yesterday, with anti-government demonstrators in the streets of Iranian cities, Trump posted a warning on his website: if the Iranian government “kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” which he followed with language unique to a blustery leader like him: “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” Leave a comment The operation in Venezuela by all branches of the United States Armed Forces, in conjunction with civilian federal law enforcement agencies, appears to have been a model of meticulous planning and efficient execution. In short, it was ingeniously impressive. If Trump and Rubio and Hegseth said one thing yesterday that was indisputably true, it was that no one could have pulled this off the way the U.S. did. But that doesn’t automatically make it right. And even if the purpose of the whole thing is what Donald Trump stated, namely, to bring Maduro and his wife to justice, is that worth what we’re taking on now, the costs and the risks to “run” Venezuela? We didn’t just take the Maduros into custody. We took Venezuela into custody. Maybe it will mean a big reduction of drugs smuggled into the United States. Maybe it will mean a revival of Venezuela’s oil industry, to Venezuela’s and America’s advantage. But maybe it will mean that Venezuela’s oil becomes our morass. Maybe it will mean that we should have been more careful about what we wished for. Share Upgrade to paid Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. He also has been a consultant for the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab. You can learn more at GregDobbs.net |