History shows that Trump’s Venezuela campaign will be disastrous

Since Sept the United States has been blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea and killing people on board with apparent impunity The current known death toll stands at According to President Donald Trump the dead and those the Navy continues to target are Venezuelan unlawful combatants and narco-terrorist members of the Tren de Aragua gang and are alleged to be transporting drugs bound for America This amounts to war on drug cartels Trump has declared allowing the U S to act in self-defense As Salon s Andrew O Hehir has written this phony war is indicative of the twisted pathology of Trump s worldview Reporting over the last week has made it clear The danger of this situation going sideways becomes greater every day And considering America s history in the region such an outcome almost seems pre-ordained Last week Adm Alvin Holsey who heads the U S Southern Command which oversees operations in Central and South America resigned less than one year into his three-year term Although the Pentagon did not give a reason for his departure the New York Times disclosed that he had raised concerns about the boat attacks as well as the larger drug counter-mission Related Trump s phony war on Venezuela and his larger war on reality Holsey s is a high-ranking resignation but he is not the first to resign or be forced out over the strikes against Venezuelan boats On Oct CNN s Natasha Bertrand shared on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth s destruction of the Judge Advocate General s Corps with multiple current and former JAGs telling CNN that the strikes do not appear lawful Doubts have also been raised within the defense department s Office of General Counsel The Pentagon has denied these reports saying there is unanimous agreement that the strikes are lawful They are not As Sen Rand Paul R-Ky revealed on Meet The Press on Sunday W hen you kill someone if you re not in a declared war you really need to know someone s name at least You have to accuse them of something You have to present evidence So all of these people have been blown up without any evidence of a crime The president though does not seem to feel any moral obligation or pressure to produce any evidence and over the weekend he inadvertently revealed the vacuity of the administration s arguments The president though does not seem to feel any moral obligation or pressure to produce any evidence and over the weekend he inadvertently revealed the vacuity of the administration s arguments It was my greatest honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit journey he declared in a social media post While two were killed Trump informed that the two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin Ecuador and Colombia for detention and prosecution Can we see the obstacle here He killed two people because they were allegedly unlawful combatant terrorists with whom we are at war But then he sent their two compatriots back to their home countries for prosecution How does that make any sense On Saturday night Colombian President Gustavo Petro went population with an accusation that in September the U S murdered an innocent Colombian fisherman whose boat was in distress Trump responded that Petro is an illegal drug dealer with a fresh mouth toward America He disclosed that he would without delay halt all counter-narcotics aid payments to Colombia which seems counterproductive and needless to say he also vowed to raise tariffs On Sunday Hegseth revealed yet another boat strike This time its three passengers were alleged to be members of yet another gang the Colombian Ej rcito de Liberaci n Nacional ELN which has long been a designated foreign terrorist organization The timing certainly suggests the strike could be another of Trump s patented paybacks this time to the Colombian president with the fresh mouth It appears that America has escalated its military mission to include yet another South American nation If all of this weren t enough last week Trump declared that he had approved covert operations in Venezuela which certainly challenges the meaning of the word covert The CIA has a long and checkered history in the region over various years but I don t think any president has been dim enough to announce it in advance American interference in Latin American affairs has almost unfailingly led to total calamity It s hard to imagine that this crazy scheme won t end up being the worst of all Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts Perhaps the greater part famous American fiasco in the region was the Bay of Pigs Conceived under President Dwight Eisenhower and greenlit in the early months of President John F Kennedy s administration the aim was to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba But it was a debacle of epic proportions and massive embarrassment for the U S Castro remained in power until Before that came the U S -backed coup in Guatemala in during which the CIA deposed a democratically elected leader ushered in decades of dictatorship and wars and demonstrated that even when the agency s plans were prosperous there was calamity Later the U S governing body didn t stop a military coup in Brazil helped dissidents assassinate the leader of the Dominican Republic and covertly supported the insurgent contras in Nicaragua leading to the Iran-Contra controversy But the bulk grotesque of U S interference in the region was the leadership s complicity in the so-called dirty wars of Argentina and Chile in the s Under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henry Kissinger approved the repression of Argentina s left-wing under the military junta that had overthrown the democratically elected executive At least people were disappeared murdered and tortured In Chile the U S backed a coup of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende The product was the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet whose spy master brought together all the right-wing governments in the region including Argentina Brazil Bolivia Paraguay and Uruguay in aid of Operation Condor a campaign of repression against leftist movements and assassinations of individuals throughout the region We need your help to stay independent Subscribe currently to assistance Salon s progressive journalism But the apparent template for Trump s obsession with Venezuela was America s invasion of Panama in which removed dictator Manual Noriega from power According to official numbers Panamanian soldiers and civilians were killed in the invasion Local tallies though placed the number close to Noriega was eventually arrested and brought to the U S where he was convicted on charges of drug trafficking racketeering and money laundering Since Noriega was literally a CIA asset one might have thought the executive could have removed him from power without all the fireworks He was distributed to France in Even Plan Colombia which was ostensibly a human rights oriented strategy conceived in the s under the Clinton administration had mixed results Under this operation the U S provided economic aid to the country while strengthening the rule of law and supplying military equipment to fight drug cartels Plan Colombia helped the market and reduced violence overall but it also displaced large numbers of people and the drug eradication activity was an environmental tragedy Presidential administrations have meddled in Latin America and South America for decades While Trump is clownishly crude in his approach he certainly isn t the first president to use a splendid little war to prove U S dominance And like all those before him he s almost certainly going to create a whole lot of human misery in the process Read more about this topic Trump aims for one-party rule and puts despotism at our doorstep From Venezuela to America Trump wants to bring the war home Pete Hegseth s press crackdown is backfiring The post History shows that Trump s Venezuela campaign will be disastrous appeared first on Salon com