The Sunday Reed :: No War in Venezuela

Don't Believe the Trump Administration

During a Thanksgiving Day call with members of the military, President Donald Trump (R-Sundown) said the following:

“In recent weeks, you’ve been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers,” Trump said during a call with military service members that alluded to the boat strikes, adding: “We’ll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon.”

As Trump and his administration tune up their war drums, we must remember that wars of choice, entered into without proper justification (ie - an attack on the United States) ended in disaster for all involved, no more so than for those we claimed to ‘liberate.’

While Venezuela is a major transshipment point for narcotics, this alone is not reason enough to invade the country, topple its regime, and be dragged into yet another quagmire. More likely, a consortium of bad actors are looking hungrily at the country’s massive oil reserves, Trump is wagging the dog, and Jared Kushner has his eye on beachfront property. Whatever lies they come up with, now is not the time for war, and Venezuela is not the place.

We’ve Been Here Before

Our most recent examples of wars of choice, Vietnam and Iraq, were fought well within living memory. Today, there are still some seven million living Vietnam veterans. There are another two million Americans who fought in post 9/11 conflicts, most often Afghanistan and Iraq (many served in both.)

In both cases, the wars themselves were not winnable, not in any political sense. As it is today, the US military was then the most formidable fighting force humanity had ever known. The ability to defeat an enemy in a conventional, one on one, open field fight was never in doubt.

As 1968’s Tet Offensive demonstrated, North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong irregulars were no match for army and Marine formations in a more traditional battle. Though North Vietnam was badly shaken by the losses during Tet, they understood the offensive’s main objective: Americans watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news.

In Iraq, we’d already beaten Saddam Hussein’s army once in the previous decade. To do so again, after more than a dozen years of no-fly zones and sanctions, was not in question. It wasn’t whether the 101st Airborne Division and the US Air Force would decimate Iraqi forces through ‘shock and awe,’ it was only a matter of how long it would take.

Winning the peace, if there could be one, was never discussed, let alone planned for. In Vietnam, the only ‘viable’ option was to prop up, support, and discard a succession of corrupt and incompetent regimes that had no public support and no ability to convince its own soldiers to fight.

In Iraq, Viceroy Paul Bremer (a one-time assistant to Henry Kissinger) ruled the country by fiat from the Green Zone for a year. In that time, he dismissed all Iraqis who’d been members of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and dismantled the military. With the stroke of a pen, he fired the bureaucrats who made the country run (such as it was) and left millions of young, heavily armed and demoralized men out of work. On his way out the door, he protected all American service-members, civilian employees, and contractors from prosecution under Iraqi law.

Using the benefit of hindsight, and decades worth of research and reporting, it is clear we should have chosen peace, the normative state, rather than war, the alternative state, that would never provide positive outcomes for anyone involved.

Vietnam Was Never “Winnable”

As the Japanese Empire collapsed in 1945, many former European colonies, like Vietnam, proclaimed their independence and nationalist movements began forming. The French, looking to regain her prestige lost after capitulating to the Germans in a 40 day campaign, wanted Indochina back.

Between 1946 and 1954, the French would fight Vietnamese forces, being bled in human and financial terms. They were caught between their early desire for prestige, and America’s growing demand that the French serve as a bulwark against Communist expansion. French commanders knew they never had enough men, a reliable government, or the will of the people on their side. Following the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, they left, battered, bloodied, and poorer for the attempt.

We would not heed their lessons, no matter how many inspection tours were deployed in the name of presidents from Trump to Johnson. The Domino Theory, in which one country falling to communism would cascade into regional red domination, was based on yet another fundamental misunderstanding of the people we were hoping to save.

Even so august a figure as France’s Charles De Gaulle pleaded with President John F. Kennedy to stay away from Vietnam. The irony is that Kennedy himself had toured the country as a young senator and saw no way for an outside power to predominate. De Gaulle wrote in his memoirs:

“We French have had experience of it. You Americans wanted to take our place in Indochina. Now you want to take over where we left off and revive a war we brought to an end. I predict that you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire however much you spend in men and money.”

In 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to use military force in Vietnam in response to alleged North Vietnamese attacks on US Navy vessels. LBJ was unsure of the casus belli, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara knew the incident was overblown. Despite all this, passage was near unanimous in a city and country where no politician wanted to appear weak on Communism.

The Vietnam War, or The American War, would last until 1975. In all, it would cost American 58,000 killed, billions of dollars in national wealth, and would split the country in two as younger Americans protested our presence, many of them knowing it was only a matter of time before their draft number came up. Two presidencies would be consumed with the fighting, leading to a loss of faith in our leaders that is today reaching its nadir.

“Slam Dunk”

On September 12th, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began planning the invasion of Iraq. Once they’d made their choice, and easily convinced President George W. Bush of the necessity, they spent the next year coming up with the evidence.

Then CIA-Director George Tenet told Bush the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was a ‘slam dunk.’ The administration, knowing no one other than Secretary of State Colin Powell had the gravitas to make their case, sent him to lie to the world in front of the United Nations. Powell later expressed regret in multiple interviews for having given the speech, calling it a blot on his record.

Author’s Note: Both Tenet and Bremer would later be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The die was cast.

In Washington, like their Capitol Hill forebears, Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force after having been either convinced of the intelligence or worried about seeming weak on terrorism as the Bush Administration, changing its tune as necessary, conflated Al Qaeda with Hussein and declaring that Saddam was too dangerous a figure to international peace (which he had been) to stay in power.

Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld ever expressed regret for the invasion. In the years after he left office, Cheney never once publicly wavered in his belief that the war was a righteous endeavor.

Author’s Note: I worked at the White House from 2002-2003. Just after my departure, I was called back to do an advance to Northern Ireland. In what would be their last meeting before the invasion, I helped plan (logistics only) the Belfast summit between George Bush and Tony Blair. Inside the tent, there was no doubt whatsoever Iraq was a threat to be dealt with.

Immediately after the invasion, surveys showed 71% of Americans approved of the use of military force against Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, the marketing a war of *personal choice* was successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Those we ‘liberated’ were not so fortunate. Some estimates indicate one million Iraqis died between the invasion and 2007. ISIS appeared, the region destabilized, Saddam is dead as are many of the architects of the war.

Donald Trump’s “War on Drugs”

As Charlie Sykes laid out in his post this morning, only Donald Trump could make the case for destroying the narcotics trade while simultaneously pardoning a politician intimately connected to their operations:

We Must Say NO to War in Venezuela

If Vietnam and Iraq aren’t enough, think back to Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Both attempted to invade the largest country on Earth only to be swallowed by its size and frozen by its winter. Or Afghanistan, called “The Graveyard of Empires” for a reason. The English couldn’t win there. The Russians tried and failed twice. We spent two decades trying to win the peace only to fail and see the country revert to Taliban control.

We’ve believed, as we always do, that we’re somehow different, that our young men and women, willing to do their duty, can change hundreds if not thousands of years of local, tribal, or cultural customs for which they’ve been offered no education and cannot be expected to understand.

Venezuela may be closer to our shores, but she is no different. Yes, Nicholas Maduro is a monstrous dictator. That reality does not equate to American troops being seen as liberators. With the notable exception of occupied European nations during World War 2, most local populations are not running out to greet American military forces, nor were ancient peoples when Rome’s legions came to town.

As my late father told me many years ago: “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” The American military can defeat Venezuelan forces but that doesn’t mean they should be asked to. We can topple Nicholas Maduro but that doesn’t mean the United States should (once again) be deciding how other nations run their affairs, even if badly.

Would we tolerate the Canadian Army or the Mexican military crossing our borders because they saw Donald Trump as a threat? Trump and his incompetent cabal are indeed a threat to domestic and international peace. We must do all we can as citizens, the vox populi, to stop yet another war in which our blood and treasure, and that of innocent civilians, will be spilled for a war of choice.

No amount of marketing, propaganda, yellow journalism, or political cowardice should allow us, The American People, to actively or tacitly approve of yet another foreign adventure for which there can be no good outcome.

Next Up: Part II - The Moral Case Against War