Maduro
Well, it seems to have gone pretty much nowhere. A big flop. Far from being a dictator, Maduro appears to be running for the most forgiving person in power on the planet. A dictator would have had Guiado shot; a normal politican would have had him arrested for treason by now.
Remember when the CIA was feared for being good at coups? (Well, to be fair, they’re still racking up some: The Color revolutions and Maidan, in particular.)
One of the reasons the US keeps invading and bombing countries is that the CIA keeps failing; they couldn’t overthrow Saddam, Khomeini, Assad, Castro, or Gaddafi. The black boys having failed, the military is then the last resort.
It would be better if the US just let other countries run their own affairs and dealt with whoever wound up in charge. The coups usually backfire (as with overthrowing Iran’s elected government and installing the Shah), and the wars leave failed states and refugee crises behind, while fueling violent terrorism and powerful militias. But some empires never learn, I guess.
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someofparts
It’s even worse than I thought: https://fair.org/home/zero-percent-of-elite-commentators-oppose-regime-change-in-venezuela/
someofparts
Once more with humor: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/04/30/if-the-agenda-to-oust-maduro-was-honest-instead-of-dishonest/
StewartM
Ah, the legacy of the big, bad Hugo Chavez. As Greg Palast says, we’re fine with any other oil state oligarchs and tin-plated dictators while Hugo Chavez actually won four elections (according the Carter Center, in fairer elections than the US), and by contrast with Saudi Arabia and several US-allied oil state allies, Chavez’s Venezuela was a bastion of freedom and democracy.
US foreign policy has not been supporting ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ since WWII, it has been all about supporting capitalism. What matters most is a) the country has a capitalist economic system, and b) Western companies, particularly US companies, are free to profit from and exploit the labor and natural resources of that country. What the US wants is developing countries have a ruling class that is like ours increasingly is–a leadership willing to sacrifice the interests of its own people for the profits of capitalists, particular Western capitalists. Any amount of unfreedom or brutality by said government will be tolerated if that is done.
johnnygl
The list of CIA/state dept failures is longer than even a lot of people who discuss these things realize. Or maybe critics of imperialism don’t often think about the incompetence of the imperialists?
Chavez, Noriega, Milosevic, Putin, Morales, and Correa, all couldn’t be toppled by coups in some form. Military was required, or didn’t get toppled at all.
In ecuador and argentina, it appears the US basically got lucky and someone more favorable got elected.
someofparts
“The list of CIA/state dept failures is longer than even a lot of people who discuss these things realize.”
I heard that the real complaint the US had with Assange was that he hacked CIA files that revealed some of their hacking tricks. Seems that getting secrets out of the CIA shocked people because that hasn’t happened before.
Now I wonder how much of the outrage at Assange was fueled by the organization’s sense of its own declining capabilities.
wendy davis
this iteration of the coup seems to be on hold, as leopoldo lopez and his family have taken refuge in the chilean embassy in VZ. but it sure ain’t over: next might be a false flag cia assassination of guaido, which would lead to ‘a miltary intervention’, hinted at by mafia don pompeo in this interview w/ CrapNeoconNetwork’s wolf blitzer. ‘the starving and dying from lack of medicine is down to…the russians’, all of which story is utter hogwash, of course.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1123350955272044546
@someofparts: i do think the cia vaults wikieaks publishes sure did piss off pompeo, then haspel, and as per some leak to cnn, they’d added a subpoena for jonathan shulte to appear before the gj.
and now WL provides a document saying that the DOJ sent a letter to assange-hating dumbsheit-borg’s attorneys are ‘asking him’ to appear, promising him immunity from prosecution from his testilying…i mean testimony. they’d parted company over the publication of the afghan war logs, says the wiki. those charges could lead to ‘aiding the enemy’ under the 1917 espionage act. but i reckon that they’ll add charges once julian’s safe in the clutches of gitmo or florence super-max.
assange’s extradition hearing begins tomorrow.
ponderer
I don’t think there is one unified force involved. There are competing groups within the security state and elites each pushing their own boogiemen. Possibly aided by Trump himself, this latest “embarrassment” isn’t as straightforward as it might appear. The factions that want to target Iran or China consider Venezuela a distraction at best. A simultaneous war in our current middle eastern quagmires and South America is unpalatable for even the dumbest chicken-hawks. I’m sure AIPAC is pointing that out to Trump. Bolton and Pompeo are pulling out all their tricks but it’s really not a possibility for the US to “win” such a war even with the complete help of Venezuela’s neighbors.
The CIA, where successful, is in assassinations. They haven’t managed anything beyond that, ever, to my knowledge. If you consider the relatively long rule of the shah a success, you have to compare it with the rule of later hostile forces.
metamars
Donald Trump, who, in his previous incarnation as Candidate Trump, said,
“We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past…We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments…. Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States]… We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism …In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will.”
has basically abandoned this saner POV for a foreign policy that sure seems like a continuation from the previous 2 Presidents. The taming of Candidate Trump may be why the Mueller probe was terminated, since it’s “mission accomplished” http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/tit-for-tat-why-did-mueller-let-trump-off-the-hook/ With neocons like Bolton and Pompeo in charge, I see more misery ahead for Venezuela. I have some hope that the Russians and Chinese will frustrate American regime changers indefinitely, without allowing Venezuela to degenerate into Syria-like chaos.
The Russiagate nonsense also almost certainly helped derail Candidate Trump’s more populist domestic imperatives, and in that sense was also a great success for the status quo forces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJEw0b9lCmY
Would I be cynical to note that none of this derailed a massive tax break for the rich?
On the positive side, Steve Bannon argues that Trump continues to have success “deconstructing the administrative state” and making progress in shifting industrial supply chains back to the West. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqrjaUC3oak . Bannon, as well as others, suggest that some of the perpetrators of the Russiagate hoax attempted coup may be brought to justice.
Good luck with that one, Steve.
Ché Pasa
Correct. Which is why there are rumors of Eric Prince’s intervention with “5,000 mercenaries” as soon as he can line up enough cash from Venezuelan exiles, random billionaires and crackpot Gulf monarchies — and of course the bottomless US treasury — to get the job done. It would only take a few billion and a month tops, right? Sure. Why not? And if there’s a civil war, Iraq-ize the country. That’ll teach ’em. Fucking peasants.
I saw Bolton and Pompeo on the television yakking; they were nervous and sweaty and bewildered. Something went so wrong. They couldn’t figure out what. Clueless. The rioting-“insurrection” continued yesterday, but to no clear object at all. Guaido has limited support even among the upper classes and apparently none at all among the majority poor and marginalized Venezuelans.
So the ricos want to take back their country from the brown and previously dispossessed majority; yes. Their sputtering failure — thanks to the clown they apparently selected with the help of the demon clowns in DC — is driving them nuts. It’s not unlike the routinely failed efforts to unseat the revolutionary Cuban leadership. When they can’t do it, they go crazy. They can’t understand why the revolution (which was against them and their rulership in the first place wasn’t it) has so much support despite the sanctions and consequent economic “collapse.” They don’t get it, any more than the gangster Cuban exiles understood why the people of Cuba despised them and weren’t giving up. No matter what.
Maduro, surprisingly, seems to be holding on handily. He’s no Chavez, but he has not only thwarted every coup attempt so far, he seems to have increased his support among the masses and perhaps among the military too. Guaido is left free to holler and sweat on the streets and the teevee as he wishes. The fact that he hasn’t been seriously interfered with at all is telling. Maduro and the government are not afraid of him. Not even afraid of the US and Trump.
Nevertheless, the ricoriots-“insurrection” seems partially modeled on the old fashioned color revolutions of yore. Most of those worked back in the day, but then the People in many cases had buyer’s remorse. They’d been tricked. They didn’t get freedom and prosperity. They got sham-democracy and kleptocracy that quickly degenerated into crypto-fascism. In Latin America the pattern is too clear. And too well known.
People as evil and soulless as Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Bolton and Prince — with the eager cheering of a deeply compromised congress, both parties leaderships and most members — will try it anyway. Simply because they can and they want to control all that precious oil.
But what will “success” look like?
Steve Ruis
So, true. We demand self-determination as our right, but for others? Not so much.
Tal Hartsfeld
We have so many people in the U.S. itself who are without and in need, an infrastructure badly in need of refurbishing and rehabilitating, so many internal and intranational issues to address
…the United States would actually benefit from “minding its own business and ‘tending to its own garden'”.
But those in charge don’t want to nurture or guard their own countries. Their concern is solely with how much power they can wield—and with nurturing their own overinflated egos.
different clue
@Steve Ruis,
Part of what Candidate Trump ran on was ” not regime changing other countries” etc. That is part of what at least part of his voters were voting for. So that part of America at-least was voting to respect the self-determination of others.
The Deep Establishment ( Catfood Democrats, Clintonites, Legacy Republicans, etc.) was able
to push and trap Trump into supporting the same old Indispensable Nation agenda as before. Trump’s low level of intellectual functioning made it easy for them.
Sanders, Gabbard and Gravel are running for the DemNom on the same concept. They probably mean it and believe it. Should one of them get nominated and then elected, the Indispensable Nation Conspiracy will try torturing them into adopting Indispensable Nation Imperialism. Could a President ” No More Indispensable Nation” defy that pressure? The experiment is worth performing.
If Prince can insert his 5,000 mercenaries into Venezuela, many people and maybe even organized war-fighting formations will enter Venezuela from neighboring countries to defend Venezuela and the basic principle of denial-of-permission against foreign mercenary operations.