No one actually thinks the
same Donald Trump who kicked off his run for the White House by calling
Mexicans rapists, and subsequently, as president, left Puerto Rico for dead
after Hurricane Maria, cares at all about the Venezuelan poor. No one actually
thinks the murderers row of Cold Warriors—led by two of the most extreme
right-wingers in American politics, Venezuela envoy Elliott
Abrams and national security adviser John
Bolton—cares at all about the starving people in Venezuela or their plight.
No one reading this, be they right, left, center, libertarian or communist,
actually buys the prevailing narrative that the U.S. is sending “aid” to
Venezuela as a humanitarian gesture.
So why is everyone pretending
otherwise?
There are a number of
reasons why these superficial narratives take hold, but I’d like to speculate
on two of them.
First, the crisis in Venezuela
is very real and very daunting. Without litigating who’s responsible for what,
whether U.S.-led sanctions and economic sabotage are more to blame or the
economic policies of Nicolás Maduro, one simple fact is true: The status quo is
untenable. Perhaps, then, the instinct to “do something” is understandable. But
as with previous crises, both organic and contrived, what that “something”
is remains unclear. Liberals—as they did in the build-up to the invasions
of Iraq and Libya—are easily pressured into this “do something” posture.
The way these things work,
however, is that this vague moral directive often involves a combination of CIA
and U.S. military intervention. During the Syrian conflict, for example, it
meant U.S.- and NATO-led bombings of Syrian forces and a tacit declaration of
war under the guise of “no-fly zones.” What’s never considered is a reduction or
cessation of U.S. involvement, be it CIA
weapons running, wide-scale bombing campaigns, or the
imposition of sanctions—all of which prolong a given conflict or simply
make it more violent.
Because a core tenet of
American liberalism is to avoid assigning blame—at worst, its adherents
believe, the U.S. is run by a bunch of bumbling
do-gooders—what the American empire is actually doing to fuel a conflict
cannot be debated, much less censured. And so the notion that we could simply
cease our crippling sanctions, which even the pro-opposition Economist acknowledges are
designed to “starve” the Venezuelan people, is simply not an option.
The current “something” in
Venezuela we’re all compelled to “do” is ensure the arrival of a humanitarian
aid convoy. The fact that the bulk of the international aid community has
either distanced itself from this PR stunt or outright opposes it has been
widely ignored by the mainstream media. One exception is NPR, which
recently reported
this inconvenient truth:
The U.S. effort to distribute
tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans is more than just a humanitarian
mission. The operation is also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela —
which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with
it. Humanitarian operations are supposed to be neutral.
That’s why the International
Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations agencies and other relief organizations
have refused to collaborate with the U.S. and its allies in the Venezuelan
opposition who are trying to force President Nicolás Maduro from power.
“Humanitarian action needs to
be independent of political, military or any other objectives,” Stéphane
Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, told a press briefing last week in New York. “The
needs of the people should lead in terms of when and how humanitarian
assistance is used.”
In fact, no neutral observer
of international aid thinks Bolton and Abrams’ convoy is anything but a
mechanism to foment civil war and regime change. We know this because
high-level administration officials and their allies on the right keep telling
us that’s the case. As the New York Post recently proclaimed,
“U.S. delivers aid to town bordering Venezuela to undermine President
Nicolas Maduro.”
Donald Trump delivered a long
and rambling speech in Miami last week and didn’t once mention human rights,
instead railing against the evils of socialism. Former acting FBI director
Andrew McCabe reflects in his new book that Trump has openly
fantasized about overthrowing Maduro, something he has discussed in
White House meetings. “That’s the country we should be going to war with,”
Trump said, according to McCabe. “They have all that oil, and they’re right on
our back door.”
Determined to maintain U.S. hegemony
and control over the world’s largest-known oil reserves, the Trump officials
plotting this latest coup aren’t even bothering to take its humanitarian
pretext seriously. Why, then, are purportedly centrist and liberal media
outlets?
A second matter to consider is
how our government has weaponized the public’s sense of morality. Since
the Spanish-American
War, the U.S. has used humanitarian concerns as a shield against criticism
or skepticism, and it has more or less worked every time. It’s why “aid”
organizations like Air America used food transports to ship guns to
anti-Communists in Indochina in the 1960s and ’70s. (Weapons were code-named
“hard rice.”) And it’s why Elliott Abrams—the current quarterback of this
latest affair in Venezuela—used
humanitarian aid shipments to smuggle weapons to the Nicaragua’s
Contras in the ’80s. Ultimately, these shipments allow for massive military
buildups, without anyone in the media or Congress asking too many questions.
After all, what kind of monster is opposed to helping starving people?
It’s impossible to know if the
current shipments to Venezuela are being used to transport weapons, although
Venezuelan authorities say
they have intercepted American arms shipments. But given the history of the
U.S. (to say nothing of Abrams’), and the fact that the Trump administration is
openly calling for Maduro’s ouster while amassing forces along the Colombian
border, it’s not exactly a long shot. Still, our political press dismisses the
possibility as tin-foil hat stuff, at least in part because mocking wacky Latin
American “conspiracy theories” is a mark of one’s seriousness in foreign policy
circles.
Unlike a lot of U.S. regime
change activities, reports indicate that this latest stunt was exceptionally
rushed and slapdash. The Wall Street Journal paints
a picture of a U.S. operation its architects believed would work in a
day or two:
“The people who devised it in
Caracas and sold it here [in Washington], sold it with the promise that if
Guaidó made a move and [South American countries] and the U.S. came in behind,
the military would flip and Maduro would go,” said a former senior U.S.
official. “They thought it was a 24-hour operation.”
Because the large-scale
military defections expected never took place (as they almost never do), the
U.S. has had to resort to its Plan B for promoting conflict and galvanizing the
Venezuelan opposition: On Sat., Feb. 23, President of the National Assembly
Juan Guaidó will carry out a “humanitarian
avalanche” at the Venezuelan border with Colombia and Brazil that, when one
reads the fine print, sounds
a lot like a U.S.-led invasion. Billionaire Richard Branson is reportedly
organizing a “humanitarian aid” concert the night before. But we know this is a
fig leaf, and we know this because those running this operation say so again
and again. Bolton himself has speculated that Maduro could end up in a “beach
area like Guantanamo.”
Despite all the evidence
before them, MSNBC, CNN and countless other networks and publications across
the ideological spectrum refuse to frame this humanitarian gambit as an act of
hostility. Instead, knowing what they know and who they are covering, they have
largely portrayed Trump, Bolton and Abrams as champions of the Venezuelan
people.
It goes without saying that
hundreds of thousands are suffering in Venezuela, and the instinct to alleviate
that suffering is a healthy one. But a craven marketing stunt by far-right Cold
Warriors—without any buy-in from actual aid organizations—cannot be taken at
face value.
Just as the U.S. military has
made calls to high-ranking Venezuelan officials, I am writing directly to the
editors, television producers and reporters of our most prominent news outlets.
I’m asking you to defect and come to the side of the patently obvious. Unlike
the Pentagon, I can’t bribe you or promise you amnesty, but I can appeal to
your basic sense of integrity and intellectual honesty: At best, you are
helping provide cover for a campaign designed to starve the Venezuelan people;
at worst, you are enabling a military conflict that will drag on for years.
One does not need to hold any
normative opinions about the fate of Venezuela to be able to identify a naked
PR campaign when they see one. Journalists with blue checkmarks on Twitter must
say so before this gets any further out of hand.
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