I think it’s worth recalling the last time wingnuts were strutting around D.C. declaring "victory", boasting about making their own reality, and how they were going to show the rest of us how “war works”.
Didn’t end up so fucking well, did it?
And that was with Dick Cheney & Co., an administration stuffed with people like Paul “The Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth” Wolfowitz, but who looks like fucking Metternich compared to this bunch of idiot grifters.
At least the Cheneyites knew they were booting the post-war occupation. These dumb clucks? I'm not even sure they understand the whole "Phase IV" concept. Yes. They're that stupid.
Couple of quick notes here:
First (as a geologist); the whole "OMFG Venezuela has SO MUCH PETROLEUM!" thing misses one really important point. That much of - as in "a very large to overwhelming percentage of" - the Orinoco Belt is nasty, dirty, tar-sand type deposits, full of sulfur and organics and other shit.
While they're supposedly less filthy than the Canadian tar sands, they're deeper and more difficult to recover, and only slightly less costly to process. Compared to the light sweet crude pumped out of the Gulf region, or even out of our own domestic fields, they're a fucking pain in the ass to access, expensive to process, and unlikely to be worth the oil majors' time and investment unless global crude prices rise, and rise a lot.
Felony Fats is too goddamn stupid to know that, or even understand it if it was explained to him. But the point is that while the selling point of this whole dick-waving exercise was "take the oil" that's been stuck in his brain cell since Iraq, the actual oil that's there? Ain't that big a seller.
Second, I'm not sure that anyone in this crew really understands, or is even close to understanding, the volatility of the region, but let's just put it this way; if you thought that the Middle East was an unpromising locale for freedom to reign after whichever despotic sonofabitch got the chop?
You'll love the northwest parts of South America.
Colonialism - and Spanish colonialism, so the worst of the European lot - social friction, extreme wealth amid extreme poverty, deeply corrupt (hello? Spanish colonialism?) "institutions", such as they are, dysfunctional governance...there's a houseful of dynamite inside the former Gran Colombia, and dozens of potential sparks that could set it off, one way or another.
So…we’ll see. My bet is that these nimrods haven’t got a plan for the same things that screwed the Bushies in Iraq. I hope for the sake of the people in Venezuela that the sparks that set Iraq on fire aren't struck in the shantytowns of Caracas.
But I sure as hell wouldn't be surprised if they were.
Just a point of fact, the "Stupidest Guy On The Face Of The Earth" was Doug Feith, but Wolfowitz was in close competition!
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts are that this is another example of US military tactical and operational excellence in service of dumb and incoherent strategy. Maduro is a POS and Venezuela is a basketcase, but what's the end-game here? Not that anyone should take anything this admin says as the truth or consider it credible, but the justifications and next steps coming out from the admin are incoherent and contradictory at best.
Feith! There's a blast from the past, but, yeah...he and Wolfie are sort of the conjoined-twin-idiots of Dick-n-Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure. My bad; forgot which one was the Stupidest Guy.
ReplyDeleteI've been convinced for decades that we (the U.S. Army in particular and the DoD in general) has been utterly consumed with what I think of as "OHL/OKW Disease" from the German higher echelon thing - going back through Schlieffen all the way through 1945 - where they were and we are superbly good all the way from the tactical to operational levels of warfare and completely acephalic above that.
Mind you, our system is SUPPOSED to leave those strategic/grand strategic decisions to the civilian leadership; secretaries of defense, state, NSA, Congress, and the executive are the ones who supposedly decide 1) whether to make war or not, and 2) the ends which (also in theory) determine the means.
But the civilian - and, particularly, the GOP civilian - "leadership" is incoherent as best and fucking looney as a rule, and if the folks inside the five-sided funny farm haven't realized that these Feiths and Wolfowitzes are just going to keep doing this dumb shit by now?
Well, to coin a phrase...WASSSSSSSSF.
The whole system does depend on a political system and a political class that understands the bare minimum of strategy. The Cold War, for all the bad decisions we did during that, at least focused and framed things.
DeleteEver since the end of the Cold War, our political class more and more seem to see our preeminent military power as a tool for short-term political ends. There's nothing there there except the expectation to remain the king of the mountain and be able to act globally whenever the mood strikes whoever is sitting in the WH.