“Mission Accomplished"
Harken back
On Saturday morning, January 3, Trump held a press conference at Mar-A-Lago to announce the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their compound in Caracas in the wee hours of the morning.The press conference is worth watching, if for no other reason than for what it may herald. (Click here to watch.) Trump, Secretary of Defense (of “War”) Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and venture capitalist), General John Daniel "Raizin”Caine. Trump engaged in his usual lying in the form of invented statistics, boasting, and self-congratulation, but he spoke with tired hesitation and nearly fell asleep while standing as the others spoke. Hegseth engaged in his usual inane, childish, tough guy chest pounding. In the course of the presentation, although a nod was made to gangs and drugs, the regime’s feeble justification for the attack, it seemed abundantly clear that the invasion and extraction were really about “our” oil—apparently referring to the nationalization of foreign oil companies’ property in the 1970s.
All the speakers appeared to believe that by removing Maduro, the remaining government of Venezuela (and the oil companies) will quietly go along with the Trump regime’s plan to redevelop the oil infrastructure and exploit Venezuela’s oil reserves. This was explicitly not an effort to re-establish democratic function in Venezuela: “We” (i.e. the Trump regime) plan to “run” the country. The winner of the election stolen by Maduro, Edmundo González, wasn’t mentioned. María Corina Machado, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was dismissed as a lightweight as a candidate to replace Maduro. Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was characterized a cooperating even though she had either, on national TV, denounced the invasion. Consider, for just a moment, the mixed feelings and uncertainty the citizens of the U.S. would experience if China swept in and kidnapped our president. Eastern Washington U.S. Representative Michael Baumgartner, however, asserted the Saturday of the invasion was “certainly a great day for the people of Venezuela”.
Woven into the presentation, not so subtle threats were issued to Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba as countries that could be subject to similar strong-arm treatment as part of the “Donro” Doctrine, Trump’s conception of U.S. domination of the western hemisphere.
As I watched and listened I could not help by think of George W. Bush’s self-congratulatory declaration “Mission Accomplished” speech and banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, six weeks after the invasion of Iraq. Of course, the mission had only begun, a mission that stretched to an official end in 2011 and cost roughly 4,500 American dead, 32,000 wounded, and somewhere around three quarters of a trillion dollars of direct expenditures, not to mention at least several hundred thousand Iraqi dead. And remember: in the Iraq War we at least paid lip service to fostering democratic government and the invasion was a collaborative effort with a number of allies. In Venezuela we are going in as the five hundred pound gorilla of the western hemisphere.
In is just-the-facts-ma’am reporting in the Sunday Spokesman Orion Donovan Smith calmly and with understatement debunked Baumgartner’s comments that parrot the Trump regime [the bold is mine]:
Baumgartner said Maduro’s regime poses a threat to Americans “first and foremost” because of its role in trafficking cocaine, which is largely produced in neighboring Colombia, to the United States.
Baumgartner added that Venezuelan immigrants to the United States have destabilized the country and brought criminal groups, such as the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“I think there were over 7 million Venezuelans that had fled to the U.S. during the Maduro regime,” he said. “Those uncontrolled immigration inflows cause a lot of destabilization, and certainly they can bring the criminal network with it as well.”
An estimated 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country since Maduro came to power in 2013. About 770,000 of them had come to the United States as of 2023, according to the Migration Policy Center, and other estimates suggest as many as 1 million Venezuelans had entered the country.
And then Baumgartner’s pliant conformation to whatever Trump does:
Baumgartner said he also wasn’t informed of the strike ahead of time, but he said congressional leaders “had a pretty good understanding that there was a high probability that the U.S. would be taking action against Maduro.”
In October, Baumgartner told The Spokesman-Review that although he supported the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, “there has to be congressional oversight and authorization in these major foreign policy actions.”
We are represented by a Trumpian yes-man. Here’s Baumgartner’s D.C. number: 202-225-2006.
The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife is likely the beginning of a long and expensive slog—both in lives and in treasure.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry