The Maduro Raid Was Impressive

It's surprising how smoothly that seemed to go, though there’s a lot more to find out about the operation this weekend that extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and welcomed him to Brooklyn. Even the fact that there were no American deaths in an action that elaborate, directed at another nation's presidential compound, is extremely impressive.

But removing Maduro promises to be merely the first phase of the operation, which seems devoted to making Venezuela a colony of the United States. "We'll run it properly," Trump said. "We'll run it professionally. We'll have the greatest oil companies in the world go and invest billions. We're not afraid of boots on the ground." But they ought to be afraid of a quagmire, a quagmire of a classic sort we’ve sunken into before.

It constitutes a reminder that, though Trump’s often called an isolationist and though he’s repudiated "regime-change wars" (to use the phrase favored by his Homeland Security Secretary Tulsi Gabbard), he appointed Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil to be his first Secretary of State. The invasion of Iraq under the Bush administration, Trump has repeatedly said, was "stupid." But the most stupid part, for Trump, was not ending up in control of Iraq's oil.

The US, Trump pledges, will extract "a tremendous amount of wealth" from Venezuela, which makes you wonder whether this was about Maduro's alleged "narco-terrorism" at all.

American companies, greatest or not, are still a very long way from controlling Venezuela's oil fields, which are among the world's richest. Snatching the president is one thing, but Trump’s evidently contemplating some sort of occupation. Perhaps this will take the form of a government directly run by the US military or oil executives, or perhaps it will (in the classic fashion) consist of a puppet government in which the US military works through local agents.

The puppet technique, which has long been favored by the CIA (which ran the Venezuela operation too), helped accomplish the two worst and most humiliating defeats in American military history: Vietnam and Afghanistan. In both places, we appointed locals as dictators and then went through a series of them. We created the world's most corrupt regimes. And we ended up slinking out of the country as the people who cooperated with the governments we sponsored were tortured and executed, or fleeing willy-nilly, clinging to planes or boats.

Trump appeared to be trying out Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez for the puppet role, saying that he’d spoken to her and that she told him, "We'll do whatever you need." He added, "I think she was quite gracious. But she really doesn't have a choice." In her public statements, however, Rodriguez has been less enthused about the attack than Trump indicated. In an address on Saturday, she called the it "shameful" and described Maduro as Venezuela's only legitimate president.

So the puppet idea is going to require more work. What Trump said indicates, however, that the country will be directly run by the greatest oil companies in the world as a sort of corporate fiefdom. That sounds bizarre and exploitative. And more to the point, it’s guaranteed to fuel a vicious resistance. I think that if the US pursues this strategy, it’ll end up expending much money and military casualties to little effect, and finally evacuating the country in humiliation.

Evidently, Maduro's government is relatively intact even if Maduro’s gone. Snatching the president isn’t the same as changing the regime, which preceded the reign of Maduro, being associated with his charismatic predecessor Hugo Chavez.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has denied that the Maduro operation was an "invasion," describing it instead as a "law enforcement operation." Now, that's a pretty elaborate and spectacular law enforcement operation, performed by the military, but it's true that it's not a full-scale invasion. For that, the US will need tens of thousands of troops and all the logistics they require; then it’ll need to create and administer a governmental bureaucracy; and then constant vigilance against sabotage and resistance. This is going to require hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade or so. And it will very likely end up as a losing effort.

As parts of the Middle East and Africa have been dominated over a period of decades by Islamists of the kind who sent occupied Iraq into civil war or defeated the US in Afghanistan, Venezuela has been dominated for decades by socialists; it has a leftist identity that’s far wider than Maduro. This resistance, as Afghanistan, will likely persist for decades. More relevant for right now is the question of what happens next or immediately. "Properly" and "professionally" or otherwise, we’re very far from running the capital, the oil fields, the government of Rodriguez, or anything else in Venezuela. 

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell