The U.S. Navy nuclear carrier USS Gerald Ford and its battle group, which includes some 80 strike and other aircraft and Tomahawk equipped surface combatants, is about to join a dozen other warships including a force of about 2,000 Marines, in the Caribbean.
Part of this force includes the U.S. Military Sealift Command’s Ocean Trader, a 22,000-ton mystery ship over two football fields in length with a crew of about 40 and up to 200 special forces and their equipment embarked. All are off the Venezuelan coast as B-52’s and B-2’s pass overhead like wolves circling prey.
The question is “What next?”
A word of advice: Do not invade Venezuela.
This is not Operation Just Cause of December 1989, in which George H.W. Bush ordered 27,000 U.S. troops to capture Panamanian President Manuel Noriega. The U.S. had a base in Panama facilitating that operation. No such base exists in or near near Venezuela. And Venezuela is 12 times larger than Panama with about six times the population.
As far as regime change, the White House needs to be reminded of a bit of history. We tried that in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a number of attempts in Central America.
When the U.S. and United Kingdom succeeded in Iran ending the Mosaddeq regime in 1953 and replacing him with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, that ultimately did not turn out well with the 1979 revolution that installed the ayatollahs.
In October 1983, the Reagan administration launched Operation Urgent Fury, ostensibly to rescue a handful of U.S. medical students studying at St. George's University in Grenada. The real reason was to halt the Cubans from building a runway that would give the Soviets another aircraft carrier equivalent in the Caribbean.
Unfortunately, all those assumptions were dead wrong. As the operational commander Vice Admiral Joseph J. Metcalf told Washington, the students were not in danger. As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked Reagan the night before the invasion, what the U.S. was up to, as Reagan admitted, “what else could I do? I had to lie.”
If Reagan had told the truth, Thatcher would have told the president that the runway was being built by a U.K. corporation as part of a plan to expand tourism and that it employed the lowest cost labor provided by Cuba. Castro had one demand: He wanted Cuba armed and loyal guards to prevent the workers from defecting.
So what is the Trump administration trying to do now, and why? No satisfactory explanations have been given yet.
Part of the argument is the assertion that the U.S. is now waging an active drug war against designated narcoterrorists, giving the president the authority to use military force to destroy small boats allegedly carrying drugs north.
Further, Venezuela is viewed as the center of gravity for these operations. But U.S. intelligence and law enforcement reports show that Colombia and especially Mexico are the villains in the drug and fentanyl trade. Venezuela is a sideshow.
The White House has already disclosed that CIA units have been authorized to operate in Venezuela in what are now non-covert ways.
Regarding the destruction of these small so-called drug runners, it is more than arguable that using the military violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbidding the use of the military in law enforcement. And should the president approve strikes against targets inside Venezuela, as the novelist Tom Clancy wrote in “Clear and Present Danger” three decades ago, this could be in direct violation of the War Powers Act.
Perhaps in applying maximum pressure the administration is forcing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to resign or abdicate. If so, what if this does not work?
Will Trump follow Russian President Vladimir Putin, who amassed a huge army on Ukraine’s border in 2022 and attacked, or instead use Special Forces to seize Maduro, as Bush did in Panama with Noriega? And then suppose, like the ill-fated 1980 Iranian hostage rescue attempt Operation Eagle Claw, this raid also failed?
While some Americans agree with the strikes on what are believed to be drug-runners, there is no due process nor any clear rationale why that is vital in a nation supposedly dedicated to the rule of law. In a bizarre way, the administration may be recreating the Abu Ghraib scandal that plagued George W. Bush.
So please, President Trump, do not invade Venezuela or continue this drug war without telling us why.
Harlan Ullman is UPI’s Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist, a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council, the chairman of two private companies and the principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. He and former United Kingdom Defense Chief David Richards are the authors of a forthcoming book on preventing strategic catastrophe.
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