Will The Last One To Abandon Venezuela Please Close The Door?

Abandon all hope those who enter…Venezuela is finished.

The expression usually goes, “Will the last one to leave please turn off the lights?” However, this doesn’t work in the case of Venezuela, because the lights (and all other electrical appliances) have been off for days, thanks to the incompetence and corruption of the Maduro regime. So they have to close the door instead, if it hasn’t already been stolen off its hinges and chopped up for firewood.

The reason you don’t hear much about Venezuela these days.

Another expression says that no news is good news, but again, that doesn’t quite fit for Venezuela. Here, no news means bad news and slimming chances of toppling the dictatorship. Thanks to an unmotivated pueblo (the Venezuelans themselves), with the meddling of spoiled American Socialists, and foreign Hate-Americanism,  the Socialist Chavistas have won, and you can kiss Democracy and prosperity goodbye for the long foreseeable future.

No one really cares about Venezuela any longer, and as the old saying goes, “Dog bites mailman isn’t news. Mailman bites dog is.”

What are the results of international “help” to mediate the crisis?

None. The Lima Group accomplished nothing, and talks in Norway accomplished even more of nothing, where Maduro agreed to new elections for the National Assembly (his opposition, if you didn’t know, the people he hates), but no new elections for his position as illegitimate President. Which fools thought the results of such talks would be otherwise?

How did we get here, with now close to 4 or 5 million having fled?

U.S. liberal domestic opinion (but more like anti-Trumpism) forced a refusal to intervene militarily, tying Trump’s hands. Incorrect analysis of U.S. military intervention and its aftermath, also at the highest levels of U.S. military command, have contributed to this poor assessment.

On the first point, it shouldn’t matter what the rest of the world wants us to do. It’s fine if they don’t believe in American Exceptionalism, but the moment we Americans don’t believe in it ourselves, we’re finished.

And military action is the only way to fix this. Maduro has to be thrown out.

On the second point, both conservative and liberal media paraded out top military brass (mostly retired) to explain their opposition to military intervention, offering opinions about the political realities of what would happen in the event of military action. The problem I have with this?

The U.S. has always lived by the separation of our military and political arenas, so since when did ex-military become experts in geopolitics? The political gives the orders, the military follows them. How is their voice in this credible, issues that fall outside the realm of military logistics?  What expertise do they bring to the table as to the probabilities of fast, successful, political, domestic reconciliation? Who voted for them to make such judgments!?

Why fears of a costly and deadly prolonged U.S. occupation are dead wrong.

The next time you find yourself impressed by the newsworthiness of Business Insider, take a look at their arguments against U.S. intervention as published on their June 14th website, simplifying the issue by bringing up today’s poster boys against any U.S. military action anywhere in the world, Iraq and Afghanistan. But Venezuela is not Iraq or Afghanistan.

First, Venezuela is a lot closer to us. From a military standpoint, that’s a big difference right there. Not to mention those U.S.-friendly, neighboring governments who, despite public, politically correct statements to the contrary, want Maduro out, and want millions of VZ migrants out of their countries.

Next, the Venezuelan people are not anti-America, quite the opposite in fact, and it’s not a religious issue either, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Venezuelans don’t perceive a “Christian” U.S. intervention as The Crusades against them, as Muslim countries do. Plus, they’ve lived the modern western life and want back at it; they’re not living in mud huts like many in Kabul.

To continue, Business Insider makes an argument that it won’t be an easy win for the U.S., which is simply false. It will be fast, with minimal loss of civilian life. They also claim there will be a long, protracted resistance movement to a U.S. “occupation,” but they fail to explain exactly who is going to resist:

The Venezuelan military will not fight on the basis of political or economic ideology, nor the militias in the pueblo, old men and women who go through military drills with broomsticks, whose resistance would be comical at best. (And the military leadership will fold in a heartbeat.) Give the people food, medicine, reliable electricity and water, safety in the streets, and that resistance fades immediately. These same factors turn the people and the rank and file military.

Business Insider also claims that drug cartels working on the borders will  come out in arms against the U.S., which they categorize as a bad thing, but isn’t that what we want? Is Business Insider inferring there’s something wrong with fighting traffickers, in both drugs and people? Seems to me more of an added benefit of U.S. involvement, not a negative!

China and Russia are paying a huge price for their mistakes, and everything Trump is doing is exactly right.

In the meantime, Trump’s sanctions are crippling Maduro’s ability to repay China and Russia the billions in oil value owed to them, and that’s a good thing, but don’t ever think that U.S. sanctions are responsible for Venezuelan suffering. China, Russia and Chavismo did that all by themselves. And global oil prices didn’t surge either, despite alarmist concerns that U.S. sanctions would cripple Venezuela’s capacity to produce, because anyone who’s been following Venezuela and their PDVSA state oil company has known for a bunch of years that their production was already drastically declining.

What will convince Trump to make a military move?

Right now, probably nothing. He has enough irons in the fire around the globe. However, 2020 is coming, election cycles affect thinking and policy, and a second term could change everything.

He might just conclude, “The hell with the advisors. Send them in.”