Operation Free the Petroleum!

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.