SOUTHCOM Head Threatens Military Intervention in Venezuela
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org - Home - Stephen Lendman)
The Pentagon hammer treats everything targeted like a nail, notably nations, one after another pounded to rubble, the human toll of no consequence.
In Thursday testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee members, SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Craig Faller turned truth on its head, pretending usurper in waiting Guaido, a nobody elevated to prominence, is Venezuela’s “legitimate” president, adding:
“We are prepared to protect US personnel and diplomatic facilities (militarily), if necessary” - despite no threats facing them except invented ones. They’re free to come and go as they please, leaving the country unobstructed if they wish.
Calling conditions in the country “dire,” Faller failed to explain what congressional members already know. The US bears full responsibility for what’s going on, waging economic, financial, and sanctions war on Venezuela, low oil prices compounding crisis conditions.
The US agenda is all about making its economy scream, wanting its people to suffer, high crimes against humanity, the way Washington operates globally, raping, destroying and plundering targeted nations.
Admiral Faller is part of the sinister plot to topple Maduro and eliminate Venezuelan social democracy.
He lied calling Maduro “illegitimate.” He lied saying he’s “starv(ing) (Venezuelans) by using food as a weapon, while corrupt generals are rewarded with money from illegal drug trafficking, oil profits and businesses, all at the expense of the population and the rank and file military.”
He said “(i)t’s to beat something with nothing,” acknowledging large-scale Chinese regional investments, together with Russia in Venezuela
He lied claiming external state actors, meaning China and Russia, may leverage their regional positions militarily in support of (legitimate) governance in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua - sovereign states the US targets for regime change.
He lied claiming Iran is involved in hemispheric state terror. He falsely accused governments in regional nations the US doesn’t control of involvement with criminal organizations, narco-traffickers, illegal immigration, and violent extremists.
“(W)hen our neighbors are threatened, we are threatened,” he roared, claiming regional “partnerships” are critical to the layered defense of our homeland.
So-called regional partners are US colonized nations led by puppet regimes, including US installed ones in Brazil, Honduras, Haiti, Paraguay and elsewhere.
Washington supports a rogue’s gallery of regional fascist despots, druglords, state sponsors of terrorism, and other anti-democratic elements.
Earlier US regimes supported ruthless father and son Duvalier in Haiti, fascist Rios Montt in Guatemala, Pinochet in Chile, an array of Mexican despots, Fujimori and others like him in Peru, Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, and other death squad rulers in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere in the region.
Instead of combatting terrorism, the US supports it, the Pentagon and CIA involved in recruiting, arming, funding, training and directing the scourge of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other groups it pretends to oppose, including regional death squads.
Writing earlier about the “shameful history of the OAS,” Oscar Sanchez Serra said the following:
“Throughout its history, the (largely US-controlled) OAS made democracies ungovernable, turned them into dictatorships, and when they were no longer useful, reconverted them into even more diminished and servile democracies, because in the new, neoliberal era, with trans-nationalized oligarch(ic) capital, they were part of a much more sophisticated power structure, whose bases were not necessarily located in the presidential palaces or parliaments, but in continental corporations.”
In cahoots with Washington, most OAS nations have been “involve(d) with death, genocide and lies…It is a political corpse and should be buried as soon as possible.”
“The reality is, without the OAS, the United States would lose one of its principle political/legal instruments of hegemonic control over the Western Hemisphere.”
Does the Trump regime intend intervening in Venezuela militarily? Is shock-and-awe terror-bombing an option as in Middle East countries and elsewhere, perhaps a ground invasion, gunboat diplomacy, or a combination of all three, maybe sending in the marines planned?
If the latter option is what Trump regime hardliners have in mind, US troops will invade the region for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt withdrew them from Haiti in 1934.
In his noted anti-war classic book titled “War is a Racket,” General Smedley Butler, the most highly decorated US service member, twice awarded the medal of honor, the nation’s highest military award, powerfully denounced the scourge of US military intervention before the Pentagon existed.
Calling himself “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers” – a “gangster” for monied interests, he explained that he “operated on three continents.”
Written in 1935, the book is far more relevant today than then, an indictment of what imperial wars are all about, supported by both right wings of US governance and the nation’s major media - cheerleading the rape, destruction, and plunder of one nation after another.
Is Venezuela next in line for destruction, occupation, colonization, and pillaging the same way?
Is America’s killing machine set to rape another country for Wall Street and Big Oil?
How much mass slaughter and destruction will it take to call the campaign successful?
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