Exclusive – Marco Rubio: Military Option ‘Always There’ in Venezuela Because U.S. National Security at Stake
6:45
A military option to solve the political crisis in Venezuela is “always there” because too many rogue actors have established themselves in the country and could jeopardize U.S. security, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told Breitbart News in an interview Tuesday.
He emphasized, however, that the use of force against Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime was not a first or preferable option, and that the current American role in the country is to support the Venezuelan people in their quest to restore their democracy.
They need international support, he argued, because Maduro has made it impossible for their president, Juan Guaidó, to exercise his legal powers by keeping him from administering state funds, controlling the nation’s military, or having access to the presidential palace, Miraflores. Guaidó struggles to access even the most basic resources to do his job both because of Maduro’s intervention and the fact that Venezuela is sufferingshortages of practically every necessary good after two decades of socialism.
Guaidó became president in January after the National Assembly, the federal legislature, declared Maduro illegitimate. Maduro claimed to have “won” an election last May in which he blocked non-communist candidates from running, used violence to intimidate Venezuelans into supporting him, and even still managed record low turnout at the ballot. As Maduro’s last term ended in January, the election left a power vacuum the Assembly filled with Guaidó’s interim tenure, as the Venezuelan Constitution mandates.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to dismiss the possibility of military action against Maduro, though his administration is not known to have taken any material steps towards troop deployment.
“That option [military intervention] is always there simply because the United States has a right to defend its national security and there are national security interests assigned to this,” Rubio told Breitbart News. “As an example, you have the presence of Russian military advisers on the ground … and not ten people, you’re talking hundreds … you have [the] potential of a permanent Russian naval presence.”
The government of Russia has established a significant military presence in Venezuela at Maduro’s invitation. Evidence suggests that Moscow has built a complex military infrastructure in the country, equipping Maduro with much of the ammunition he uses to repress peaceful protesters and deploying dozens of military specialists to help Maduro retain power. This weekend, Maduro’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza suggested Maduro may soon request an even more “expanded” Russian military invasion of Venezuela.
An overwhelming majority of Venezuelans, 87.9 percent, believe Russia and Cuba have invaded and colonized Venezuela, according to a poll released by the Venezuelan firm Meganalisis this week. The same survey found 89.5 percent of Venezuelans support an international military intervention to oust Maduro.
Rubio identifies the presence of 5,000 man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADs), surface-to-air missiles believed to come from Russia, in the country as another threat. The top commander of Colombia’s armed forces, Gen. Luis Navarro, accused Maduro on Monday of providing MANPADs to members of the National Liberation Army (ELN), a Marxist terrorist organization operating out of Colombia.
The threats, Rubio argued, go beyond those tied to Russia.
“You have the likes of Hezbollah and Iran, and government officials who are more than willing – for the right price, but it’s not very high – to sell official but falsified travel documents, passports, so that terrorists can move around freely in the region,” he noted. “You have the open support of drug cartels who aren’t just tolerated, but cooperate and work alongside the regime … there’s a migratory crisis triggered by this regime that is destabilizing our strongest anti-drug partner in the region in Colombia.”
Any one of those threats could, at any time, require a military response, though Rubio states that the U.S. is not interested in taking that route if avoidable.
“Our focus here is on supporting the democratic aspirations of the people of Venezuela. And that is not a U.S. initiative, that is a Venezuelan initiative that they took on and that 53 other countries support. We are supporting a regional effort,” he said.
That effort appeared to reach a new climax last week when Guaidó announced that the military had abandoned Maduro and urged civilians to take to the streets to support the soldiers. Maduro resurfaced on television, dancing and claiming that Guaidó had lied. More than a week later, reports indicate that the military is in disarray as neither man completely controls it and soldiers do not know if their immediate superiors consider Guaidó or Maduro their commander in chief.
Guaidó needs help, Rubio tells Breitbart News, giving the opposition credit for the success of their efforts so far given their limitations.
“To be fair, Juan Guaidó has no instruments of formal power. He has no money, he has no bureaucracy, he has no security forces, he has no access to the media,” Rubio noted. “Any time he tries to speak or communicate on social media, they shut down the internet. He is operating under very difficult conditions. It’s not as if he can buy commercials and go on national TV and speak. Literally every time he holds a rally, they shut down the internet.”
Rubio adds that Guaidó also lacks “some of the basics we take for granted,” like easy access to gasoline for his car to get to opposition rallies around town. Even assuming he ousts Maduro, Venezuela will need help to reconstruct itself. A free Venezuela, Rubio explained, would need months to rebuild: “It’s not just holding elections, you’d have to remake the [Supreme Court] TSJ … you’d have to have a fair electoral commission that runs these elections, you have to allow freedom of the press so the candidates can communicate, you’d have to allow political parties to organize.”
“In the meantime, you’d have to have police officers, you’d have to deal with a bunch of street gangs, colectivos, that have had unfettered power to make crime all day in exchange for enforcing regime mandates when called upon,” he continued. “You’d need to start rebuilding the electric grid and having systems in place for people to access food, medicine, life basics, and I think that’s going to have to [require] a coalition of various actors.”
Operating alone with few resources, he adds, “it’s amazing they [the opposition] have gotten as far as they have gotten.”
The U.S. has been helping by sanctioning key regime figures, who had long enjoyed access to wealth and luxury abroad in places like Miami, Florida, and the Caribbean. Rubio confirmed Guaidó’s claims that key figures within the Venezuelan political elite are in talks to abandon Maduro and predicted that the situation is too uncomfortable for many of them to stay on his side.
“What has changed somewhat is that the level of desperation and despair is such in Venezuela at this point that even high ranking officials, I believe, have grown increasingly tired of living in a country that is always on edge,” Rubio said. “You could have all the money and the power in the world, but every time you go out on the street, everybody’s unhappy, and the rank and file underneath you are unhappy, and you just know it’s not a sustainable situation. And a growing number of them are prepared, and have been for a while, to move away from Maduro.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
The social crisis and the global eruption of US imperialism
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has spent the past week staging provocations and making military threats everywhere from the Caribbean shores of Venezuela to the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea and the Arctic Circle.
Pompeo, the thuggish former Army tank captain, who claims divine inspiration for his every action, staged his latest provocation Tuesday by summarily canceling a scheduled meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and flying to Baghdad. He flew into the Iraqi capital under a cover of secrecy in an attempt to strongarm the Iraqi government into backing the US war buildup against Iran. He was also there to push for further concessions to Exxon and other US energy conglomerates in the name of “diversifying” Iraq’s supplies.
The trip to Iraq served the dual purpose of escalating the US war buildup in the Middle East and snubbing Germany, with which Washington is in conflict over a host of issues ranging from trade and Iran to the Nordstream 2 Russian gas pipeline.
Wednesday marked one year since US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or JCPOA, which Tehran signed with the US, Russia, China, the UK, Britain and France. The agreement severely limited Iran’s nuclear program and initiated a strict inspections regime in return for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions imposed by Washington and its allies.
Since then, Washington has steadily tightened a regime of extra-territorial and illegal economic sanctions that are on a scale tantamount to war. They are aimed at stopping all Iranian oil exports, cutting the country off from the world financial system and reducing its economy to ruin in order to further the US goal of installing a puppet regime in Tehran.
Pompeo and other US officials have touted the dispatch of the USS Eisenhower’s carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf along with a wing of nuclear-capable B-52 bombers as evidence that US imperialism is “fully prepared” to respond with overwhelming force to any perceived threat to “US interests” in the region that can be pinned on Tehran.
The US has never been closer to an all-out war with Iran, a country four times the size and with more than twice the population of Iraq, the scene of the last major direct US military intervention in the region, which led to a million deaths and left the entire Middle East in turmoil. A new war would drag in the entire region and, inevitably, Washington’s “great power” rivals, becoming the antechamber of World War III.
Even while bringing the Middle East to the brink of a new conflagration, Washington is threatening military action against Venezuela, with Pompeo insisting on Sunday that a direct US regime-change intervention in the South American country—like Iran the target of brutal US sanctions—would be “lawful.”
Meanwhile, on the eve of his flight to Iraq, Pompeo was in Finland attending a conference of countries with territory in the Arctic in which he denounced Beijing for pursuing “national security aims” in the region and Moscow for “a pattern of aggressive behavior in the Arctic.” He even threatened Canada over control of the Northwest Passage. While hailing the thawing of ice in the polar region for opening up new sea lanes and the potential exploitation of vast mineral wealth, Pompeo refused to sign a joint statement of the Arctic countries because it included a reference to climate change.
Then there is the dangerously escalating confrontation with China, with the US set to increase tariffs on Chinese goods to 25 percent by Friday and Beijing vowing to take countermeasures. In the midst of this drive toward all-out trade war, the US sent two of its warships once again into waters adjacent to China’s Nansha Islands, a so-called “freedom of navigation” operation designed as a military provocation that could lead to armed conflict.
More and more, world politics today resemble the conditions prevailing in the run-up to the first and second world wars, a period in which Leon Trotsky warned that history was “bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”
This drive to global war is a product not merely of the maniacal outlook of Trump, Pompeo, Pence and Bolton, but rather of the fundamental contradictions of a crisis-ridden capitalist order—between world economy and the outmoded nation-state system on the one hand, and socialized production and the private ownership of the means of production on the other.
US capitalism has sought to offset its declining global hegemony by military means, engaging in unending wars over the last quarter century. In terms of its economy, the capitalist ruling class has directed all of its policies to sustaining the continuous rise of the stock market and preventing a repeat of the 2008 financial crash. The encouragement of the uninterrupted accumulation of profits by means of financial market manipulation and speculation only assures that the next financial and economic meltdown will be all the more catastrophic.
What are the social effects? Under conditions in which the majority of US workers have not seen an increase in real wages in more than three decades, the growth of financial parasitism has led to an enormous intensification of social inequality and rising social tension. This is giving rise to a growth in the class struggle, expressed in the nationwide wave of teachers strikes, the radicalization of youth and, most recently, Wednesday’s globally coordinated strike of Uber drivers.
No section of the capitalist ruling elite and its political representatives, Trump and the Republicans or their ostensible opponents in the Democratic Party, have a “rational” solution to these intensifying economic and social contradictions.
They are driven to find a way out with a turn toward authoritarian methods of rule at home and by deflecting internal tensions outward by means of military violence. They are, in short, looking for a war. Exactly when and where it will come first remains to be seen.
There is in the crisis of US imperialism, its turn toward global military confrontation as well as the domestic social and political context, an echo of the way in which internal crises drove the Nazi regime that headed Germany to war in the 1930s.
The late British historian Tim Mason wrote in his Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class the following about the turn to war by Hitler’s Third Reich:
The economic, social and political tensions within the Reich became steadily more acute after the summer of 1937; while it seems safe to say that Hitler himself understood very little of their technical content, it can be proved that he was informed of their existence and was aware of their gravity. If the existence in the winter of 1937–8 of a conscious connection in Hitler’s mind between this general crisis and the need for a more dynamic foreign policy cannot yet be established, functional relationships between these two aspects may nonetheless be suggested…The only “solution” open to this regime of the structural tensions and crises produced by dictatorship and rearmament was more dictatorship and rearmament, then expansion, then war and terror, then plunder and enslavement. The stark, ever-present alternative was collapse and chaos, and so all solutions were temporary, hectic, hand-to-mouth affairs, increasingly barbaric improvisations around a brutal theme.
Changing what needs to be changed, there is in the know-nothing Pompeo’s frantic flights from South America, to the Arctic, to the Middle East, threatening war and economic destruction wherever he goes, the same “temporary, hectic, hand-to-mouth” character to the Trump administration’s policies. They too are accompanied by brutal and “barbaric” improvisations, from the attempts to starve the peoples of Venezuela and Iran into submission to the near-genocidal US-backed military campaign against Yemen to the threat of a full-scale global war.
Until now, the US ruling class has been able to hatch its plans for global aggression behind the backs of the American people, relying on the absence of any organized resistance to war. But with the growth of the class struggle, popular anti-war sentiment will inevitably take on active forms and meet up with rising opposition of the working class to social inequality and the attacks on democratic rights.
The contradictions that are behind the eruption of American imperialism cannot be overcome within the framework of the Democratic Party, which is itself a willing and active protagonist in the war fever of the ruling class. The fight against war is the fight for socialism, and the fight for socialism requires the fight against war. Only through the development of a mass social movement, embedded in and led by the international working class, and directed at the overthrow of the capitalist system itself, can the drive to a new world war be stopped.
No comments:
Post a Comment