Yeah, like if it came down to military confrontation, the US might have trouble occupying the country, but they could still do major damage. They eventually lost, in a sense, in Vietnam, but not before doing horrible damage to the people there, some of which is persisting damage from chemical weapons. Granted, the empire is not as powerful today as it was in Vietnam, relative to other militaries in the world. But it’s also more abstracted today, insofar as being able to do more with less boots on the ground, and has barbaric reasons to test that kind of technology on a target to refine AI and such.
Whether some of it was bluff, or fully real, the Maduro operation put Venezuelan leadership in a position where they were facing a threat of the leadership being annihilated vs. doing some dealing. I can’t remember the details offhand, but I remember an article about this, that IIRC the story is the other leaders were facing immediate threat of something happening to them too. Like the US basically had a gun to their head.
And considering what they managed to do in Iran, in spite of how capable Iran’s military is, I would not put it past them being able to do some precision assassination still, in a country that is positioned as much weaker militarily than Iran is. That would surely create blowback like it did in Iran, but Venezuela would have a much harder time turning that blowback into a military response that is capable of making the US hurt in return.
Either way, I’m not the one running a country with a gun to my head having to make that call and I have consciously tried to change my own mindset to sort of back off on matters like these when it comes to passing judgment on the peoples contending with them. In my case, there’s a layer to it where, being a “white” Yankee, I see it as part of unlearning the western superiority view; do I have experience running a country under the shadow of imperialism? No. Have I led to success, or taken over leadership on after it’s establishment, a people’s revolution? No. Have I even lived under the shadow of imperialism from the side of the most marginalized? No.
So I’d much rather be saying “I don’t know enough to pass judgment” than condemning some figure I know little about and never even bothered to learn the name of (Rodriguez) before the kidnapping of Maduro happened. I’m not gonna hold back to the point of making it a personality, where I don’t speak up on things I am informed on, but “no investigation, no right to speak” has something to it, I think. And investigation is more than reading a few headlines.
Yeah, like if it came down to military confrontation, the US might have trouble occupying the country, but they could still do major damage. They eventually lost, in a sense, in Vietnam, but not before doing horrible damage to the people there, some of which is persisting damage from chemical weapons. Granted, the empire is not as powerful today as it was in Vietnam, relative to other militaries in the world. But it’s also more abstracted today, insofar as being able to do more with less boots on the ground, and has barbaric reasons to test that kind of technology on a target to refine AI and such.
Whether some of it was bluff, or fully real, the Maduro operation put Venezuelan leadership in a position where they were facing a threat of the leadership being annihilated vs. doing some dealing. I can’t remember the details offhand, but I remember an article about this, that IIRC the story is the other leaders were facing immediate threat of something happening to them too. Like the US basically had a gun to their head.
And considering what they managed to do in Iran, in spite of how capable Iran’s military is, I would not put it past them being able to do some precision assassination still, in a country that is positioned as much weaker militarily than Iran is. That would surely create blowback like it did in Iran, but Venezuela would have a much harder time turning that blowback into a military response that is capable of making the US hurt in return.
Either way, I’m not the one running a country with a gun to my head having to make that call and I have consciously tried to change my own mindset to sort of back off on matters like these when it comes to passing judgment on the peoples contending with them. In my case, there’s a layer to it where, being a “white” Yankee, I see it as part of unlearning the western superiority view; do I have experience running a country under the shadow of imperialism? No. Have I led to success, or taken over leadership on after it’s establishment, a people’s revolution? No. Have I even lived under the shadow of imperialism from the side of the most marginalized? No.
So I’d much rather be saying “I don’t know enough to pass judgment” than condemning some figure I know little about and never even bothered to learn the name of (Rodriguez) before the kidnapping of Maduro happened. I’m not gonna hold back to the point of making it a personality, where I don’t speak up on things I am informed on, but “no investigation, no right to speak” has something to it, I think. And investigation is more than reading a few headlines.