Have Some Maduro, M’Dear!

 

Have Some Maduro, M’Dear!

Changing World Order, Regime Change, Oil or Just a Drug Bust and Another “Distraction”?

“The invasion of Venezuela has nothing to do with American security. Venezuela is not a security threat to the U.S…. This is about making Trump’s oil industry and Wall Street friends rich. Trump’s foreign policy — the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela — is fundamentally corrupt.” 

Sen. Chris Murphy (D/CT).

“Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C'mon.” 

Donald Trump, August 2004.

“This is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn't serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks and the oil executives.” 

 Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (ex R/GA) on NBC's “Meet the Press,” December 4th .

The only people who are unhappy that Nicolás Maduro is in a US holding tank in Brooklyn are the corrupt members of Maduro’s administration, a sizeable number of his well “wink-wink” compensated military, more than a few of those in his narco-core of cartel dealers and drug fabricators and his key buyers of oil, mostly Cuba that is totally dependent on Venezuela for its oil imports. In fact, of the estimated 70 people killed (none Americans) in the seizure of Maduro and his wife, several dozen appear to have been Cuban government operatives or military. Though the response so far from local Venezuelans is muted approval over Maduro’s demise (they’re not convinced that autocracy is gone), there is extreme trepidation over what Team Trump intends to do with this country.

Where does this distrust come from? Trump’s recent termination of the federal protective status of thousands of Venezuelan refugees in the United States (with brutal ICE treatment to follow), his obvious bully tactics and seeming disdain for democracy and its safeguards, his unilateral attacks on small boats (probably with cocaine but not fentanyl) heading most for countries other than the US, his total focus on “oil” in his victory speech after taking Maduro, his increasingly cozy relationship with global pariah dictators, the incompetent mess the last time the United States fought an “oil war” (in Iraq… again initiated by the arrest of the leader of that oil-rich nation: Saddam Hussein) that resulted in an utterly corrupt failed state as the US installed a new “democratic” regime, and his obvious proclivity to vacillate yet generally cater to the desires of his corporate donor crony capitalists who seem quite content in the failed global carve-up of a planet defined by “spheres of influence and control” mega-states that began in the 17th and 18th centuries, fostering toxic alliances that resulted in WWI and WWII.

International organizations, all despised by Trump, from the WTO, WHO, NATO to the granddaddy of world peace, the United Nations, what arose post WWII, witnessed an era of relative prosperity shared globally – particularly for the US (with a few missteps like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan along the way) – now threatening to devolve into that old world volatile mix of secret treaties and egotistically ignited mega-conflicts. As the son of a US diplomat living in the Middle East for several years, I understood that by deposing Hussein (a Sunni Muslim) and installing Shiite Muslim majority – two factions of Islam that had been at each other’s throats almost since Islam began – we were effectively handing Iraq (60% Shiite) as a silent but active ally to our local enemy, Iran (95% Shiite). We didn’t get the flow of “cheap” Iraqi oil as we had hoped, and as US involved regional wars lingered seemingly endlessly, trillions of dollars and thousands of US lives later, all we really had to show for it was a massive federal deficit.

Even as Trump suggested that he has no issue of putting US “boots on the ground,” we should note that there are more than 300,000 Venezuelan troops and militia, an elaborate and cruel state security system (with almost 1,000 political prisoners, including 5 Americans) and one very, very harsh reality: If Trump is counting on lots more oil any time soon, the oil extraction and processing system in Venezuela is so badly damaged or worn out, it can only produce a mere 1% of global oil output, even as it maintains an estimate 17% of global oil reserves. Indeed, as Trump claims all that oil as “ours” because of Caracas’ nationalization of US oil operations, I am quite sure that if Trump can convince US oil companies to rebuild that lost oil infrastructure (read: a decade or more and billions and billions of invested capital), even a small revenue share and lots of new jobs for locals should make that less of a threat and more of a generous offer. Meanwhile, Colombia has also amassed military forces at its border with Venezuela to deter the US.

On the other hand, Trump’s own admissions that this was a regime change (really, as I have blogged, just a “leadership change”), and not really merely an arrest of an indicted drug lord as the DOJ maintains, hiding behind that “law enforcement” rubric fails upon even the most cursory examination. As Trump declared the US would “run” Venezuela, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, quickly made that meaning, indirect control by setting “policy.” Writing for the January 5th Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilner, summarizes: “Top officials in the Trump administration clarified their position on “running” Venezuela after seizing its president, Nicolás Maduro, over the weekend, pressuring the government that remains in power there Sunday [1/4] to acquiesce to U.S. demands on oil access and drug enforcement, or else face further military action.

“Their goal appears to be the establishment of a pliant vassal state in Caracas that keeps the current government — led by Maduro for more than a decade — largely in place, but finally defers to the whims of Washington after turning away from the United States for a quarter-century… It leaves little room for the ascendance of Venezuela’s democratic opposition, which won the country’s last national election, according to the State Department, European capitals and international monitoring bodies.

“President Trump and his top aides said they would try to work with Maduro’s handpicked vice president and current interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, to run the country and its oil sector ‘until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,’ offering no time frame for proposed elections.”

But now Trump has de facto legitimized Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Xi’s stated intention to absorb Taiwan. His follow-up threat to “take” Greenland, a part of Danish territory (Denmark is a founding member of NATO), for national security reasons (never spelled out, particularly since Denmark is fully cooperating with the US) would end NATO. Circumventing Congress entirely, Trump couches this simply as implementing an existing indictment, but everyone knows that is just a ruse, even as Maduro’s conviction is almost certain. There is no justification under our or international law that gives the President the unilateral right to invade another sovereign nation (that has not attacked us) and take over running that subjected country.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while Maduro and his wife have few supporters anywhere, Trump chose to ignore all the legal paths to attacking Venezuela and arresting its corrupt leader, he preferred the Putin/Xi approach instead: a unilateral, autocratic dictate.