GWOT, the Sequel: Kill ‘Em All

Listen carefully, and you can hear the drums of war. Only this time, neocons within the Trump administration are using the same haphazard rationale for our outrageously expensive and spectacularly unsuccessful decades-long Global War on Terror to bring the chaos much closer to the homeland. Spoiler alert: it is not likely to go well.

President Trump’s appetite for regime change in Venezuela is being driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who remains acting National Security Advisor, giving him outsized influence when it comes to foreign policy. While Trump advisor and business partner Steve Whitkoff and first son-in-law Jared Kushner are playing outsized roles mediating outcomes in the Middle East and Ukraine, Rubio—a Cuban American from Miami—has been free to obsess over his longtime interest in regime change in Latin America.

Rubio seems to have sold this to Trump as a war on drug trafficking. However, all the nonsense talking points about the hundreds of thousands of lives saved each time we blow a small Venezuelan boat to smithereens notwithstanding, Venezuela is not even a minor source of drug trafficking to the U.S. or elsewhere, for that matter. Make no mistake, this is another war for oil.

At 303 billion barrels, Venezuela has more proven oil reserves than any other nation on the planet, including Saudi Arabia, which has 267 billion barrels. It is worth noting that Saudi oil is generally lighter, easier to access, and less expensive to refine. Nonetheless, access to Venezuela’s reserves would be a serious boon for any global superpower.

For his part, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has agreed to provide the U.S. with all of the oil it needs, along with gold and other essential minerals. He has even agreed to step down, provided he can save face by doing so on his timetable and have a hand in elevating his successor.

In other words, he’s basically allowing us to get what we want without all the bloodshed and baggage that comes with waging war. There is just nothing that the hawks in the neoconservative and neoliberal wings of both parties seem to like more than long, expensive regime change wars that very rarely work and never produce results that come close to justifying the costs, both financially and otherwise.

After Trump tweeted that the world should consider Venezuelan airspace closed, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tweeted that he very much appreciated and respected the president's determination "to deal with the drug caliphate countries that inhabit our backyard." They’re not even changing the language. I guess since Maduro is not a Muslim (he’s a socially conservative Catholic), they have to go with “drug caliphate,” even though there is no more evidence that he’s a narco trafficking kingpin than that he is a jihadist.

What’s more, the White House recently hosted (and fawned over) what you might call a lapsed jihadist, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is now the President of Syria, after we spent so much effort ousting Assad, mostly because he was aligned with Russia, who we are now pressuring our supposed allies in Ukraine to cede land to, following an aggressive invasion. al-Sharaa, a former member of al Qaeda, had a $10 million price on his head and was on the FBI terror list just six months ago.

Remember that long, expensive, and utterly disastrous war in Iraq that cost about $3 trillion, saw hundreds of thousands of people die, and millions more displaced? Well, that nation is now essentially a satellite of Iran, whereas we used to view it as a buttress against the so-called “Axis of Evil” state.

Last week, a former member of a CIA zero unit in Afghanistan shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington, one of whom died. A “zero unit” is a nicer way of saying “death squad.” Rahmanullah Lakanwal was recruited by the CIA at 15 to be a child soldier serving a heroin trafficking warlord we were allied with. During that time, he was forced to execute fellow Afghans, including other children, often for doing nothing more than being on the drug trafficker's naughty list. These actual narco kingpins also routinely practice bacha bazi, a Persian name for their male child sex slaves. Again, these were our allies.

To put a big old exclamation point on the fact that our intentions on regime change in Venezuela have nothing to do with drug trafficking, Trump simultaneously announced his intent to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was actually extradited to the United States, prosecuted, and convicted on rock-solid drug trafficking charges with mountains of evidence for just the sort of case Rubio and others are making against Maduro, despite offering zero evidence.

The term for what happened when Lakanwal turned on the U.S. in retaliation for what happened to him, his family, and his country at our expense is "blowback," which came into the popular vernacular after Americans learned that the CIA also backed and trained Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Mujahideen in the early 1980s, because they were opposing the Soviets. Blowing up fishermen in tiny boats and likely committing war crimes while doing so seems sure to engender future resentment.

Highly decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler famously said, "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." Mr. Butler was not wrong.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch is also the author of three novels and a short story collection available here. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.