Say it loud and proud: Venezuela’s oil belongs to us
By Herbert Rothschild
In the early hours of Dec. 20, 1989, U.S. forces launched coordinated air and ground attacks against Panama. The regime of President Manuel Noriega quickly collapsed. He was captured on Jan. 3, brought to the U.S., tried and convicted on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Operation Just Cause, as the administration of President George H.W. Bush dubbed this military invasion and kidnapping, was but the most recent of some 12 similar invasions of Panama since 1856.
Noriega was involved in drug trafficking; he had previously been indicted on that charge in Florida. But he had been on the CIA payroll for years, including the last year of the administration of Gerald Ford when Bush was CIA director. Bush had a number of motives for seizing Noriega, but curtailing the flow of drugs into the U.S. and bringing a bad person to justice were not prominent among them.
Bombing, invading and occupying other nations who have not attacked us, and toppling governments we don’t like either by overt or covert actions, are constants in U.S. history. We’ve been doing that in Latin America and the Caribbean the longest, because they have been relatively easy to dominate through force. After World War II, from which we emerged as the most powerful nation in the world, our scope expanded. And after the Soviet Union dissolved and we had a free hand almost everywhere, our aggressions multiplied.
Were I to include covert aggressions in the following list, it would consume most of my column space. Here’s a list, possibly incomplete, of only our overt aggressions starting with Ronald Reagan’s presidency:
Reagan: Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Iran. George H.W. Bush: Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia. Bill Clinton: Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Serbia. George W. Bush: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. Barack Obama: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. Donald Trump’s first term: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iran. Joe Biden: Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan.
We could debate the legitimacy of a few of these actions. For instance, there are things to be said on both sides about the First Gulf War against Iraq and the bombing of Serbia. But when we look at the forest instead of the trees, what we see is a nation that has used its unmatched military power to violate the sovereignty of nation after nation even though the prohibition of such violations is the core principle of the U.N. Charter, founded on our initiative, and the cornerstone of international law.
Which brings us to Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and the use of special forces to kidnap its president. Trump surely won’t confess all of his real motives, which include distracting public attention from the Epstein files and shoring up his low popularity at home. But Trump disdained to name this operation some equivalent of Operation Just Cause. Never mind international law and what the rest of the world thinks — he did what he did because he wanted to do it and he could.
That is, Trump doesn’t mind showing the world the true face of this country. I’m not sure he minds showing to its own citizens the true face of this country. Make America Great Again has always been an amorphous ideology, but its implicit premise has been being strong enough to do whatever you damn well please.
On Monday, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and Darth Vader to our Orange Emperor, was quite explicit about that premise. Responding to questioning by CNN host Jake Tapper about our use of force to take over Greenland, Miller responded, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
When I wrote on Dec. 18 about Trump’s renaming our Department of Defense the Department of War, I asked, “Is Trump correct? . . . Are we so in love with power that winning is all that matters, and winning simply means dominating our opponents?” I concluded that Trump is wrong, that “the majority of Americans still need to believe that we are morally good people.” How we respond to what he has just done will test that conclusion, because the chorus of voices condemning his actions will be large and loud.
But as my foray into our history suggests, we have tolerated similar behavior for more than half our nation’s existence. There have been protests against each aggression. Famously, Henry David Thoreau went to jail because he refused to pay taxes that would fund our 1846 war against Mexico to grab huge tracts of territory. But the protests only succeed in changing policy when we are losing militarily. When we win, we’ve been content to enjoy the fruits of victory.
So, at the end of that Dec. 18 column, I said that when we are at last done with Trump, succeeding administrations will “again refer to our military machine as the Department of Defense and again clothe its aggressions in high-minded rationalizations,” but they won’t stop using it to dominate other countries.
Maybe, though, I’m wrong, and maybe I’ll have Donald Trump to thank for it. Maybe his naked aggression will be too much even for those who, consciously or unconsciously, revel in American might. Maybe by showing us our true face — the one the rest of the world knows all too well but which the majority of us have refused to own — we will recognize that face even when Democratic as well as Republican presidents mask its ugly features with a rhetoric of moral righteousness.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in these columns represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected]. Email letters to the editor and Viewpoint submissions to [email protected].
