Trump's War of Choice: A Mistakenly Belief in an Easy Win in Venezuela

At this point in time, the United Sates has both an incompetent occupant of the White House (or what is left of it) and an utterly incompetent Secretary of Defense, both of which appear to want to launch a war against Venezuela.  The Felon, a five time draft dodger, and Hegseth who never held high command seemingly want to cosplay at the cost of the lives of members of the American military and likely far, far more Venezuelan civilians.  Not, of course, that either of them care about the lives of others as they strut and posture for the MAGA base and bloviate about being "at war" with drug cartels.  So far, this posturing has only lead to the murder of those alleged to be drug smugglers on small open boats seemingly incapable of crossing the Caribbean to reach American shores,  Of course, zero evidence has been provided to confirm those murdered were actually trafficking drugs.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the war preparations while a column in the New York Times lays out why such a fool's errand war might well nor be the easy "win" the Felon wants to please his base of racist deplorables - many of whom would be trilled to see brown skinned people killed - and keep the media distracted from the Epstein files and the Republican caused government shutdown.  First, these highlights from The Atlantic: 

As a naval aviator, Alvin Holsey trained to conduct missions that required precise targeting. For years, his job was to fly helicopters over potential targets and, using radar and other detectors, assess whether they posed a threat to the United States; if so, he had to determine whether to launch an attack.

On September 2, Holsey, now an admiral leading the U.S. military’s southern command, was put in charge of a mission unlike any that has come before: The United States was, without any warning or attempt at interdiction, striking suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Early into the mission, Defense officials told us, he privately raised concerns to Pentagon leadership about the operations, which have now struck at least 10 suspected drug-trafficking vessels that the U.S. redefined as “terrorist,” killing 43 people.

Since then, the strikes have escalated even as the legal questions around them have yet to be answered. There was another strike overnight, this one killing six, according to Hegseth. And today, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft-carrier strike group, a multi-ship force staffed by as many as 5,000 troops, would travel from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. The intent, the Pentagon said, is to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors.”

The U.S. hasn’t sent this many ships to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. .  . . The carrier strike group also provides far more firepower than is necessary for the occasional attack on narco-trafficking targets. But the ships could be ideal for launching a steady stream of air strikes inside Venezuela.

For about two months, the flotilla of American warships in the Caribbean has kept Venezuelans in suspense. The White House calls it a “counter-narcotic” mission, but Latin American analysts see it as a regime-change operation. Some Trump-administration officials hope that the threat of attacks on Venezuelan soil, coupled with the drumbeat of strikes at sea, will be sufficient to force Maduro to flee, . . .

Maduro is not the only target of [the Felon's] Trump’s ire in the region. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, started complaining this month about the Caribbean strikes, claiming that they had taken the life of an innocent fisherman. Trump accused Petro on Sunday of being a “drug leader”—the same accusation he’s made against Maduro. On Tuesday, the American military struck a boat close to Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Petro, far from seeking a de-escalation, went on Univision to invoke Freud and ruminate about genitalia and machismo. At the end of the interview, he called for Trump to be ousted.

Whatever he opts to do, Trump isn’t planning to consult Congress before acting. “I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them. You know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”

Although the U.S. has called those who have been killed in its air strikes “combatants,” the administration has not provided any evidence to either Congress or the public of the threat they posed to the U.S. When two people survived a strike last week, the United States chose not to hold them, which would have led to a court hearing at which a judge might have ordered the administration to provide legal justification for the strikes

But such a campaign would not be without peril for the troops carrying it out. Since the strikes began, Venezuela also has already flown F-16s over American destroyers operating in the region. During any attack in Venezuelan air space, U.S. pilots would likely come up against Maduro’s air defenses. Analysts differ over how much of Venezuela’s air defense is fully functional and maintained, but they are in consensus that its military has a network of anti-aircraft batteries, multiple air-defense units armed with cannons, and numerous portable air-defense systems. The military also has a sophisticated long-range-missile system capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, according to Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

Ramsey warned that even if the strikes lead to defections and eventually the fall of the regime, multiple pro-government armed groups in the country could challenge a new government and contribute to a bloody outcome that would look something like Libya after the 2011 fall of Muammar Qaddafi.

The column in the Times looks at why such a war of choice may not play out as America's would-be Hitler and the drunk at the Department of Defense envision both in terms of ease and civilian deaths:

While the large U.S. military force now in the Caribbean is ostensibly there to fight Venezuelan drug traffickers, officials have all but acknowledged that the real goal is to oust Venezuela’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro. The military pressure deepened on Friday with the deployment of an American aircraft carrier to the region.

As the Trump administration doubles down on its campaign against Mr. Maduro, officials may very well have in mind Washington’s last overthrow of a Latin American leader, also accused of ties to the narcotics trade, Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, in 1989. It was an operation many hailed — wrongly, in some respects — as a quick and easy victory that ousted a repressive strongman and led to his imprisonment for drug trafficking.

The situation in Venezuela is far different, and seeking regime change there could be disastrous for the United States and the region. It is also important to recognize how doing so would fit into a larger pattern of American intervention in Latin America.

To begin with, the contrasts between Panama and Venezuela: Panama is a small country with a population at the time of the invasion of fewer than three million people. It is situated at a strategic choke point on the Central American isthmus and bifurcated by the Panama Canal, which was then still under U.S. control. It was home to the U.S. Southern Command and a permanent U.S. garrison.

Venezuela is a sprawling, geographically diverse country with a population of nearly 30 million. The United States maintains no military installations there, and it is not home to a strategic asset like the Panama Canal, unless you include oil reserves. Venezuela’s neighbors Colombia and Brazil have been at odds with the Trump administration. As policy analysts across the political spectrum have argued, the likeliest outcome of a U.S. invasion that topples Mr. Maduro is a surge in regional instability, and, according to a recent report by the Stimson Center, a worsening of the conditions leading to drug trafficking, conflict and migration.

The historian Greg Grandin has argued that one interpretation of U.S. involvement in 1980s civil conflicts in Central America was as an attempt by the conservative movement to redeem the failures of the Vietnam War, and, in so doing, renew the nation’s sense of purpose in the fight against Communism. But wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, conducted with U.S. support for right-wing combatants, quickly became morasses, leading to political blowback in the United States and the torture, death and disappearance of thousands of people across the region. Ultimately, the wars also led to large-scale Central American migration to the United States.

The U.S. military promptly dismantled Panama’s armed forces and toppled Mr. Noriega, leading to the installation of a pro-United States civilian government. American casualties were limited; 23 service members were killed and more than 300 wounded. The operation demonstrated that, in Panama at least, Washington could still strike effectively to achieve its political goals.

Yet the truth was not nearly so neat. In the process, U.S. forces leveled El Chorrillo, a working-class neighborhood that was home to primarily Black and mixed-race Panamanians. The United States documented around 300 Panamanian civilian deaths, but the actual toll of civilian dead remains in dispute; some international organizations estimate hundreds more died, and some Panamanian organizations claim the death toll reached into the thousands. In recent years, the Panamanian government has exhumed and identified victims of the invasion who were buried in mass graves. . . . Drug trafficking through Panama to the United States did not stop, and may have actually increased.

The invasion of Panama and a possible invasion of Venezuela do have some parallels. Like Panama in 1989, Venezuela poses no imminent security threat to the United States, despite what Mr. Trump has said. Mr. Maduro is not uniquely responsible for either migration or the flow of drugs into the United States. Instead, a potential assault on Venezuela would appear to be a pre-emptive war of choice, undertaken in part, as Operation Just Cause was, to satisfy a domestic constituency of the Republican Party, represented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long advocated regime change in Venezuela, and distract critics of Mr. Trump’s domestic policies.

U.S. interventions in Latin America, whatever their underlying rationale, visit very real suffering on ordinary people who find themselves in the path of the U.S. military. Even in Panama, where circumstances in 1989 were favorable to America’s aims, the operation was neither bloodless nor painless, nor completely successful. How much more serious will the consequences of such adventurism be in Venezuela?

Obviously, to the Felon and Hegseth, the deaths of brown skinned people doesn't matter.  Indeed, I suspect they see them as less than fully human.