'First Thoughts on Trump's Excellent Venezuela Adventure'
(TPM, Josh Marshall) "Let me share a few thoughts about the U.S. action overnight in Venezuela. I say 'action' because it’s not clear to me that the U.S. itself (as in the people calling the shots in Washington) know what this was, or have decided. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the news of some major U.S. attack. That only registered a few WTFs in my mind. Then I woke up again at maybe 4 a.m. and saw at the least the claim that U.S. forces had captured and exfiltrated Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Then my WTFs escalated to 11."
"When I woke up this morning I had a sense that this was essentially a raid, in the sense that we attacked and blew up a lot of things but with the central goal the capture of the head of state. That’s a raid and one that would keep the existing state in place, with perhaps the assumption that it would quickly crumble and be replaced by a friendlier government. But now the U.S. president is saying that the U.S. will 'run' Venezuela for some undetermined period of time. At least to the best of my knowledge it’s not clear whether the U.S. has any military presence in Venezuela at all or that there’s been any effort to dismantle the current sovereign authorities beyond capturing the head of state. So back to the WTFs …"
"The U.S. pulled off what is, in purely tactical terms, a pretty impressive operation. (I mean, they blew into a country, captured the head of state apparently with little resistance and brought him back to the U.S.) But my strong assumption is that they now seem to be totally winging it. And winging it would fit with a lot of my understanding of the whole series of events leading up to last night. I don’t think there’s one reason we just kidnapped the Venezuelan president or blew up the boats or placed Navy assets in the region. I think there are a number of factions in the U.S. government each wanting something like this for different reasons. Trump himself mainly thought it would be cool. And lots of different factions wanting this for different reasons and the president thinking it was cool was enough to create the forward momentum to get here. But having gotten here we don’t have any clear idea of what we’re doing. I’ll note that to the extant we accept the premise that Nicolas Maduro committed crimes under U.S. law, capturing him in a quasi-law enforcement operation does not, to put it mildly, create a rationale let alone the legal warrant for occupying the country, running its government or retooling its oil industry. I assume this goes without saying."
Continued at link:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/first-thoughts-on-trumps-excellent-venezuela-adventure