I spent part of the holiday week reading a new history of the Spanish-American War, which was partly the result of media instigation. Signature, possibly apocryphal quote of the era, in interpretation citizen KaneWilliam Randolph Hearst is believed to have said this to photojournalist Frederick Remington, who was stationed at a sleepy outpost in Cuba. Remington had seen no signs of combat, so he telephoned Hearst, who reportedly replied: “You submit photographs and I will submit combat.”
While you were putting your Thanksgiving leftovers in the microwave, another war was being prepared, not by some media mogul or corporate titan — though certainly by some defense contractor counting future bonuses inside his mansion in Northern Virginia. No, the Secretary of State is instigating this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and perhaps has an added benefit of imminent incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way to think of it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing South Florida exile friends.
More from David Dayne
Venezuela was used by Trump in the last presidential election as a way to attract disaffected voters by scaring up the idea of gangs taking over disorganized slum complexes in Colorado. But Rubio, a longtime supporter of regime change in Venezuela, didn’t want things to end there. Appeasing one’s home state’s exile circle is a narrow origin story for an international infiltration, but it rings true.
Trump reportedly wasn’t buying the pitch until Rubio related it to the president’s 1980s obsession: the war on drugs. Vaporizing alleged drug boats through summary executions, including ordering a clearly illegal second strike, has an intrinsic appeal to Trump. The inconvenient 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 he doesn’t even read that page.
Attacking Venezuela to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. would be ridiculous, even if Trump were not prepared to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker who once vowed to “stuff drugs up the gringo’s nose” and helped move 500 tons of cocaine into the country. It’s part of a group of drug dealers tied to Trumpworld, like cannabis distribution kingpin Jonathan Braun, whom Trump got out of prison with a reduced sentence and who is now in prison again, or Orlando Sicilia, a convicted cocaine trafficker who is … Marco Rubio’s former brother-in-law.
The boat attacks are the prologue. The administration has moved aircraft carrier groups and 15,000 troops into position, authorized CIA covert operations, assured that ground invasions would begin “very soon”, and recently announced the unilateral 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 immediately left the country. Trump later dismissed the airspace closure as just a social media post, but at least Venezuelans are taking it literally and seriously.
It’s hard to avoid the feeling that all of this is being done to flatter power-mad immigrants who have no regard for American interests. It even managed to get into the Nobel committee that made the disastrous decision to award the Peace Prize to opposition leader María Corina Machado, an epic mistake that will take its place alongside Henry Kissinger in the ignominious annals of that prize’s history. As Maureen Takacsik pointed out in a dynamite long-read article last week, the same people who bankrupted Venezuela under the control of a shadow government, and who carried out the failed mercenary-led coup attempt at the end of Trump’s first term, are agitating to return, despite having a surprisingly poor reputation in the country they seek to lead.
The largest proven oil reserves in the world are more the cause of war than its plunder. Last week, a federal judge approved the sale of Venezuelan-owned oil refiner Citgo to Elliott Investment Management, whose founder Paul Singer has been a Rubio supporter for a decade. But neither hemispheric control, nor petroleum futures, nor restrictions on drug supplies are the main points of this blind race. The right wants to take back control of Venezuela and has a friend in the State Department. QED.
There is no anti-war movement in this country anymore, just scattered remnants that fail to unite when the drums of war beat. Along with investigating possible war crimes in the Caribbean, it would be good if Congress made some effort to assert its war powers before we send soldiers to die for nothing.
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