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The Tragedy of Venezuela is the Tragedy
of the US
Trump doesn’t give a
farthing about Venezuela and is letting his underlings let slip the dogs of war
in so long as it secures Florida’s electoral votes for Trump 2020, says
Lawrence Wilkerson.
Knowing
what I know about my own administration’s attempt to unseat Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez in 2002, I was not surprised when the effort was recently
renewed by the Trump Administration, particularly when such arch-defenders of
Latin American rights as Elliott Abrams, Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott – not to
mention John Bolton – began to appear on the White House payroll.
Knowing as well that Trump
did not give a farthing for what happened in Venezuela but was concentrated on
what he is always focused on, domestic politics, I knew these underlings would
be allowed to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war in Venezuela so long as
doing it secured Florida’s electoral votes for Trump in 2020.
What I did not know – but looking
back to 2002, should have – is how utterly incompetent the CIA would be in
pulling off the “soft coup d’etat” that its leaders promised Trump. The events
of the past 48 hours have demonstrated that incompetence markedly, as well as
the real motivations of Trump’s lackeys on Venezuela, from the
shrimp-lusting-after-Cuba Marco Rubio to the bombastic former governor of
Florida Rick Scott, to the pardoned criminal Abrams, to the supine and totally
incompetent Juan Guaido and his backer, Leopoldo Lopez in Caracas. What a crew
the GOP can muster!
And they just might have
let slip the dogs of war.
And they let them slip into
a potentially first-class disaster – just like Somalia in 1992, Iraq in 2003,
Libya in 2011, Syria in 2012, Afghanistan today and yesterday, and on and on.
Venezuelan military. (Telesur)
I know the Venezuelan
military; I’ve trained some of them. They are not your usual “I want to shower
after meeting them” crowd, as I would describe for instance the Honduran
military. Instead, they are reasonably professional, reasonably aware of
Venezuela’s historical commitment to democracy, and reasonably competent at
their day jobs. They are proud of the fact that they are not Panama, i.e., a
country into which the U.S. can send paratroopers overnight, kill several
thousands, grab a narco-trafficker, and leave.
The majority of them, if
the U.S. military arrives in Venezuela, will take to the hills – very
formidable hills, with jungle-like backdrops – and they will harass, kill, take
prisoner from time to time, and generally hold out forever or until the “gringos”
leave. We might remember how the North Vietnamese and the Taliban accomplished
this; well, so will the Venezuelans.
Were I looking down from
Mars and with no dog in this fight, I might say that it would be suitable
comeuppance for the sheer stupidity of the Trump gang. One might shout loudly
as the quagmire develops, “Get elected now, Mr. Reality-TV man!”
But the bloodshed in
Venezuela – military and civilian – and the dead and wounded U.S. Marines and
soldiers will afford this old soldier no comfort at all. Instead such an
outcome will make me regret even more profoundly our Founding Fathers’ grievous
error in creating the Electoral College because they feared the demos in
democracy.
Keep going, Trumpster.
You’ll founder this ship of state soon enough.
This article was reprinted
with the permission of the author.
Larry Wilkerson is a
retired colonel, U.S. Army (ret.), and former Chief of Staff for Secretary of
State Colin Powell.
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