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Regime Change Failure (So Far) In Venezuela By Jacob G. Hornberger Regime Change Failure (So Far) In Venezuela By Jacob G. Hornberger !!!!
(2019-05-02 at 14:21:36 )
Regime Change Failure (So Far) in Venezuela by Jacob G. Hornberger
So far, the United States national-security establishments regime-change operation in Venezuela has met with failure.
Having designated Venezuelan public official Juan Guaido as the new president of the country, United States officials have still not been able to deliver him the reins of power.
At the very least, Mr. Guaido is not collecting taxes from anyone, which is usually a good sign of who wields political power within a country.
A couple of days ago, Mr. Guaido, perhaps acting on orders of the Central Intelligence Agency and other United States officials, declared that the revolution to put him into office was on.
He called on the Venezuelan people to take to the streets and rise up against the Nicholas Maduro regime and for the Venezuelan military to turn against Maduro.
The result was failure.
Only few hundred people showed up and the military establishment declared its loyalty to Maduro.
Mr. Guaidos right hand man, Leopoldo Lopez, who was aligned with Mr. Guaido on revolution day, quickly ensconced himself in the Chilean embassy and then later in the Spanish embassy.
The "Los Angeles Times" yesterday pointed out that there is one constituency in Venezuela that matters most - the military. Whoever gets the military on its side will win the regime-change battle.
The Times observation says as much about Venezuelas government as it does about the United States government. Both governments are what are known as "national-security states." A national-security state is characterized by an extremely powerful and permanent large military-intelligence establishment, one that wields overwhelming power within the overall governmental structure.
In the United States, the national-security branch of the government is composed of a triumvirate consisting of the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
In Venezuela, like in Egypt, North Korea, and other national-security states, all of the powers that are wielded by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are simply combined within the overall military establishment.
Thus, when we refer to the Venezuelan "military," we are referring to a combination military and intelligence establishment, one that wields such omnipotent powers as assassination, military arrests, indefinite detention in military facilities, torture, trial by military tribunal, secret surveillance, and all the other powers exercised by the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
In any national security-state, the military-intelligence establishment wields the real power within the government.
As Michael Glennon, professor of law at Tufts University, explains in his excellent book "National Security and Double Government", in the United States governmental system the national-security part of the federal government is the part that is actually in control but permits the other three parts - the president, the Congress, and the federal judiciary to maintain the veneer of power.
For example, recall President Trumps order last December to withdraw all troops from Syria.
Very quickly, the Pentagon rejected that order by announcing that the troops would be withdrawn within 3 months, not immediately.
But it never had any intention of even doing that.
This week, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Mulroy "announced" that United States troops would be in Syria "for the long haul."
If that is not proof of who is in charge, I do not know what is.
Consider who President "America First" Trump has brought into his inner circle - John Bolton and Eliott Abrams, two of the fiercest foreign interventionists and anti-communist regime-changers during the Cold War.
At the same time, he appointed Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo as United States Secretary of State.
Not surprisingly, Bolton, Abrams, and Pompeo are leading the charge for regime change in Venezuela.
Also not surprisingly, Bolton and Abrams are repeating their old Cold War anti-communist diatribes against Russia and Cuba and threatening severe action against them for supporting the Maduro regime.
No doubt we will soon be hearing how the dominoes are going to fall and how the Reds, once again, are coming to get us.
No doubt Bolton, Abrams, Pompeo, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency really did believe that the Venezuelan people would rise up and be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the Pentagon and the CIA.
In convincing themselves that the Venezuelan people love the CIA and the Pentagon, they make the same mistake they made in Cuba during their disastrous regime-change invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
At that time, they were convinced that the Cuban people would rise up against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and embrace the CIAs invaders.
It did not happen, just as the Venezuelan people did not rise up against Maduro a few days ago.
What the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency and Mr. Bolton and Mr. Abrams fail to realize is that there are two issues here confronting the Venezuelan people as well as the Cuban people.
Many, if not most, Venezuelans and most Cubans hate their socialist economic systems but the fact is that they hate the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon and their regime-change interventionism even more.
Thus, the darkly ironic part of all this is that Pentagon-CIA interventionism are responsible for making both the Cuban and Venezuelan socialist regimes even more deeply ensconced than they would be without United States interventionism.
Of course, there is still a chance that the Pentagon and the CIA could cause their counterparts in the Venezuelan national-security establishment to turn against Maduro, especially with the payment of handsome bribes to generals and colonels with United States taxpayer-funded money.
That, of course, was what the CIA tried to do with Chilean congressmen to encourage them not to confirm democratically elected Chilean Salvador Allende as president in 1970.
Finally, there is the possibility of a full-fledged United States invasion of Venezuela, which would oust Maduro from power and most likely replace him with a brutal right-wing, pro-United States military general rather than Mr. Guaido, like those tyrannical generals who were appointed to take over in Guatemala and Chile after those United States regime-change operations.
The solution to all this mayhem??
Leave Venezuela to the Venezuelans, dismantle the United States of Americas national-security state apparatus, and restore the United States of Americas founding governmental structure of a limited-government republic and its founding principle of non-interventionism.
Reprinted here with permission from Mr. Jacob G. Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation!! Their Great Website!!