US deploys Marines, landing craft in escalating threat to Venezuela
US guided-missile destroyers at sea [Photo: US Navy/Specialist 3rd Class Cole Schroeder]
Washington is sending three amphibious assault vessels carrying a 2,200-strong Marine expeditionary force to Venezuela, anonymous US officials told the
Miami Herald yesterday. They are to join a group of three US guided missile destroyers that reportedly arrived off the Venezuelan coast yesterday.
This shatters the flimsy pretext the Trump administration had earlier advanced to justify sending the three destroyers—namely, the claim that they would prevent ships in the area from trafficking drugs from Venezuela to the United States. The US Marine Corps is not an anti-narcotics police unit. The US government is clearly threatening to invade Venezuela as part of a decades-long regime change operation targeting that oil-rich country.
Asked about the naval deployments on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration is ready to take any and all military measures against Venezuela. She repeated provocative and totally unsubstantiated US assertions, made with evident contempt for the Venezuelan people, that Venezuela’s government is nothing more than a front organization for a drug cartel.
“President Trump has been very clear and consistent. He is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” Leavitt said. “The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela; it is a narco terror cartel. Maduro, in the view of this administration, is not a legitimate president.”
Leavitt was echoing threats by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on August 14 said, “the Cartel of the Suns, the Cartel de los Soles … is a criminal organization that happens to masquerade as a government. The Maduro regime is not a government. It’s not a legitimate government. We’ve never recognized them as such. They are a criminal enterprise that basically has taken control of a national territory, of a country.”
However, despite Rubio’s accusations, the US government has provided no court-tested evidence of narcotics trafficking by the Cartel of the Suns or even substantiated its existence. They have only named Maduro and parliamentarian Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister and vice president of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), as the cartel’s alleged leaders.
The US government is again resorting to the method of the Big Lie, seeking to create a pretext for war by telling lies so big that they seem impossible to refute. In the illegal 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the lie—exposed soon after US and European forces occupied Iraq—was the claim that the Iraqi government had “weapons of mass destruction.” Against Venezuela, the charge is that it is run by a shadowy drug cartel about which Washington provides no information but which it will take drastic action to destroy.
