I spent much of the holiday week reading a new history of the Spanish-American War, which was partly the product of media incitement. The signature, probably an apocryphal quote from the time, paraphrased in Citizen Kaneallegedly said by William Randolph Hearst to photojournalist Frederic Remington, who was stationed at a sleepy outpost in Cuba. Remington had seen no signs of battle, he telegraphed Hearst, who reportedly replied, “You provide the pictures and I will provide the war.” »
While you were putting the last of Thanksgiving leftovers in the microwave, another war was being staged, not by a media mogul or business titan – although some defense contractors are certainly counting future bounties in their Northern Virginia mansions. No, the Secretary of State started this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and is likely a side benefit of the impending incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way to think about it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing exiled friends in South Florida.
More from David Dayen
Venezuela was used in the last presidential election as a way for Trump to attract nervous voters by scaring visions of gangs taking over random slumlord compounds in Colorado. But Rubio, a longtime proponent of Venezuelan regime change, didn’t want things to end there. Appeasing his home country’s network of exiles is a rather parochial story for an international foray, but it turns out to be true.
Trump wouldn’t have believed the speech until Rubio connected it to something the president’s terminally ill 1980s brain recognizes: the war on drugs. Vaporizing suspected drug boats with summary executions, including what appears to be a blatantly illegal order for a second strike, has a visceral appeal for Trump. The problem is that almost no fentanyl is produced in Venezuela, but fortunately for Rubio, Trump doesn’t read beyond the first page of the briefing book, and doesn’t read that page either.
Invading Venezuela to stop drugs from entering America would be ridiculous, even if Trump wasn’t preparing to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker who once vowed to “shove drugs up the noses of gringos” and helped transport 500 tons of cocaine into the country. He is part of a litany of drug traffickers linked to Trumpworld, such as cannabis distribution kingpin Jonathan Braun, whom Trump released from prison with a commuted sentence and who is now back in prison, or Orlando Cicilia, a convicted cocaine trafficker and former brother-in-law of… Marco Rubio.
The boat strikes are the prelude. The administration positioned aircraft carrier groups and 15,000 troops, authorized CIA covert operations, assured that a ground invasion would begin “very soon” and, most recently, unilaterally declared the closure of Venezuelan airspace, after saying in a private conversation with President Nicolas Maduro that he would be granted safe passage if he surrendered and left the country immediately. Trump then downplayed the airspace closure as just a social media post, but Venezuelans at least take it literally and seriously.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that this is all done to pander to a few power-mad expatriates with little regard for American interests. He even managed to convince the Nobel Committee, which made the disastrous decision to award the Peace Prize to opposition leader María Corina Machado, an epic misstep that will take its place alongside Henry Kissinger in the ignominious annals of the prize’s history. As Maureen Tkacik exposed in a dynamite long read last week, the same people who bankrupted Venezuela when it controlled a shadow government, and who staged the failed mercenary-led coup attempt at the end of Trump’s first term, are the ones campaigning to return, despite their astonishingly poor reputation in the country they want to rule.
The world’s largest proven oil reserves are more spoils of war than cause. Last week, a federal judge approved the sale of Venezuelan oil refiner Citgo to Elliott Investment Management, whose founder Paul Singer has supported Rubio for a decade. But neither hemispheric control, nor the future of oil, nor the interdiction of drug supplies are the main point of this mad race. The right-wingers want to take over the leadership of Venezuela and they have a friend in the State Department. QED.
We no longer have an anti-war movement in this country, just scattered remnants who fail to come together when the drums of war beat. In addition to investigating possible war crimes in the Caribbean, it would be good if Congress made even the slightest effort to assert its war powers, before sending soldiers to die for nothing.
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