I don’t share your optimism Trump (or the warmongering sycophants that currently have his ear) are capable of that kind of long term planning for America
Not to mention, we are not talking about an actual full invasion and occupation here, which is what it would take to secure any oil. That would take 100s of thousands of troops and months of planning (and even trump would grasp that it would likely end in disaster)
I don’t think we know that Trump is going to do anything at all.
You have to remember that he’s a reality-show host who is just doing another reality show, and he’s watching the ratings day-to-day, week-to-week.
It’s possible that all of this is bluster, or a whim. It’s possible that he’s floating a trial balloon to see who supports it. It’s possible that he’s keeping it on a slow boil so he can stir it up whenever domestic issues get too hot for him.
Trump doesn’t even know what he’s doing, so I’m not going to pretend I know what Trump is doing, and I think it’s unwise for anyone else to assume they know what Trump is doing.
You’re probably right about the other three, but Trump’s hatred of brown people is genuine.
And we couldn’t actually gain any benefit from Venezuela’s oil. We couldn’t even gain any benefit from Iraq’s oil, despite them having a lot more of it, us spending more resources there, and oil being relatively more expensive at the time. But that’s irrelevant. Remember, we’re dealing with stupid people, here. What’s relevant is that a lot of them probably think that we could gain some benefit from Venezuela’s oil. Which helps to prop up Trump’s Coalition of Stupidity.
Venezuela is a socialist country that’s had the right-wing nutters whipped into a fringe since the Clinton administration. They always wanted Chavez’s head on a pike, and like Bin Laden, he unforgivably died on Obama’s watch, so they never got to go after him.
But Venezuela has remained a bugbear for them, and Maduro is the new face of it. Brown guy, brown name, he’ll do.
I really wonder if Trump is thinking this is a Grenada/Panama gambit for him. Grenada was a bullshit anti-communist invasion that boosted Reagan’s stature before the 1984 election. Panama didn’t do much for Bush 1, but Trump must’ve been impressed at sending the Army into Latin America to bring back a drug kingpin wriggling in manacles, and must be thinking that would be a very cool feather in his cap.
But as I said in an earlier post, predicting Trump is a fool’s errand. He’s turning up the “military action” dial and looking back at the crowd to see if they applaud. Nobody really knows what signals are making it through his media filter, or how he’s interpreting them, how he’ll choose to respond, or how much he’s even involved in the decision here.
True of course, but he has no particular beef against Maduro beyond the fact he isn’t white (and doesn’t speak English as a first language)
Yup and that’s why he choose Venezuela. But Trump has never cared about any of that stuff, any more than he cared about abortion, or any of the other things the Maga base gets so excited about.
100% definitely (remember in Trump’s head it’s still 1983, his halcyon days)
Of course. He never discovered the real world. The very thought of it doesn’t escape him, it was never there and was never looked for.
The world is what is in his mind. That’s as far as it goes.
I suspect that they’re considered legitimate targets for military action in much the same way that pirates (also civilians, FWIW) are considered legitimate targets for a nation’s military.
The argument that this is illegal is less around it being civilians and more around due process and actually knowing what’s on the boats before we sink them and kill the crews. We shouldn’t be saying “Drug boat! Sink it!”, instead of trying to get the crew and cargo and put them through the legal system. And in that case, AFAIK they have to be in US waters. Which also isn’t the case.
Yeah you can’t just cruise around the 7 seas going “pirates! they’re coming right for us!” so you can just pop whoever you feel like. Especially when you’re sitting in an AC-130J gunship well out of harm’s way.
Especially looks bad when there are witnesses who survived the strike, and you go ahead and grease them too.
And we also probably should not be saying: “Kill all survivors!” Because that is unequivocably a crime.
He certainly does not care about who is selling drugs in the United States:
Pardons
Robert C. Sherrill Conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine
Desiree Perez Conspiracy to distribute cocaine
Brian Lyle McSwain Conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine
Joshua James Smith Conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine
Russell Paul Plaisance Conspiracy to unlawfully import cocaine into the U.S.
Alice Marie Johnson Conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine; attempted possession of 12 kilos of cocaine with intent to distribute; attempted possession of 9 kilos of cocaine; attempted possession of 75 kilos of cocaine; attempted possession of 10 kilos of cocaine; conspiracy to commit money laundering; money laundering ($1.5 million); structuring monetary transactions
Michael Anthony Tedesco Conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute and distribute in excess of 5 kilograms of cocaine
Larry Hoover, who was serving multiple life sentences in federal prison for [crimes linked to his role leading the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples]
And on and on and on. And of course coming soon, a pardon for Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who is serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.
If only we lived in reality where things like “being unequivocally a crime” might actually matter in the US…
True, but off Africa it’s fair game to wreck those pirates however we feel works best. My point was that miltiaries aren’t limited in any way, shape, or form to declared, uniformed enemy combatants. It’s more a matter of a nation deciding that it’s in the nation’s best interest to use force to achieve its aims- diplomacy by other means, as the saying goes.
But Venezuelan drug boats are a law enforcement activity, not a military one. We have no beef with the legitimate government of Venezuela, and the big issue that I see is not that we’re wrecking Venezuelan boats or killing Venezuelan civilians, it’s that we’re doing so indiscriminately. If we knew that these were loaded to the gunwales with cocaine, and they didn’t respond to hails or heave to when requested, then fine, to the bottom they go.
But we can’t just decide randomly that Venezuelan boats heading in the general direction of the US are drug boats and sink them. That’s just insane.
That’s not correct. There are limits and guidelines both on what permits you to declare piracy, how you treat suspected pirates, as well as for the military attacking non-uniformed military combatants. Suspected pirates are to be detained, not blown to pieces from 20,000 feet up.
You couldn’t be more wrong about that. If it’s a law enforcement action rather than military, then the rules of engagement are more restrictive, not less, and summary destruction of a vessel is not permitted even if we “know” they are loaded with cocaine.
The point is we don’t know for sure if there were narcotics on these boats. To act as investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner from 20,000 feet is lawlessness personified. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to seize the vessel and its crew, verify that the cargo was indeed narcotics, and then grill the crew- where were you going? who was your supplier? what names can you give us? Seems to me that would be much more effective than indulging Pete Kegsbreath in his drunken masturbatory fantasies about being Dirty Harry.
What I’m getting at is that it’s our own government that decides when it’s piracy, law enforcement, military, etc…
But we’re not even following our own rules. That’s the most disturbing thing here to me. I’m not so much distressed that we’re attacking other countries; unfortunately that stuff does happen. It’s that we’re not even putting the usual legal fig leaf over it; it’s just sinking boats because some guy in Washington says they’re drug boats.
Assuming the Democrats win the midterms, I’d like to see there be a reckoning in the military- anyone who greenlit the strikes at any level needs to at the minimum get shit-canned, and some need to spend time at Leavenworth- specifically the higher officers. Really hammer home that they need to be very aware of what are and aren’t illegal orders, and refuse stuff like this that doesn’t fall within the normal realm of military operations.
Also worth nothing that Venezuela both has oil and is also oil-adjacent:
It IS about drugs – in this case, fossil fuel – and we ARE hopelessly addicted.
Also worth remembering that - just like with Iraq - nobody ever said it was about cheap oil. Control over supply = control over price.
I’ll agree to the extent that Hegseth hasn’t set forth any legal reasoning for what he’s doing (because there isn’t one). I’ll continue to disagree that the US can just declare an unidentified vessel to be a pirate or narco-terrorist and simply blow them out of the water. That’s just not true, even if cocaine were spilling over the side and the crew were doing lines in plain sight.
Hegseth hasn’t set forth any legal justification for what he’s doing because he knows there’s no legal support for it. If he’d requested clarification on the law, he’d have been told to detain the crews (or at least make the attempt). But he wants a lethal spectacle with no scrutiny or oversight, so he just blew them out of the water to ensure there were no witnesses.
Wouldn’t this one be a more relevant reason?
