This week, The Miami Herald reported that the Trump administration “has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment.” Although the stated excuse is drug smuggling, it’s pretty clear toppling Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is at least a major part of the goal.
Apparently, the chickenhawks on the right have shrugged off the horrific costs and quagmire of the Iraq war, the fact that President Barack Obama was elected in large part because he opposed it, and the fact that Donald Trump leveraged his (totally fake) opposition to it as an advantage over his Republican rivals in the 2016 primaries.
So, while Shadow President Stephen Miller salivates for more killing of Venezuelans, right-wing media are doing their best to persuade their audiences that they should support military action in Venezuela, even as the U.S. government eliminates food assistance for needy Americans and destroys their health insurance here at home.
As Media Matters laid out, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Fox News hosts, Newsmax and The Daily Wire have all promoted the war mongering and the war mongers. Chickenhawk Jesse Watters., e.g., referred to the “Don-roe Doctrine” (a pun on the Monroe Doctrine) “to argue that the United States has the right to interfere in Latin American countries’ internal affairs virtually at will.”
And just like George W. Bush's neocon warmongers, this new set of chickenhawks is painting regime change as a cakewalk, though they are smart enough not to use that term. For example, The Daily Wire host Matt Walsh comments in the above video that a war with “small, weak, pathetic, puny, poor” Venezuela “would last about four minutes.” Media Matters also showed Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, in an interview with opposition leader María Corina Machado, nodding in agreement as Machado claimed, “We are ready to take power ... Venezuela will move orderly and peacefully to the transition.”
But it’s not just the Iraq war that strongly suggests regime change will backfire.
More via Media Matters:
If Maduro were assassinated or forced to flee, factions within his government and outside armed forces would likely attempt to assert power over parts of the country. The history of Latin America is rife with examples of U.S. intervention leading to extended periods of civil war and brutal crackdowns on civilians. The more recent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan should serve as cautionary tales of American hubris; in both cases elites were convinced that an opposition leader could simply be installed with few complications — assumptions that proved to be catastrophically wrong.
Besides all that, it stands to reason that people just don’t like the idea of a foreign country deposing or killing their head of state and installing someone else by force. But the bloodthirsty Trumpers don’t care.
