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GELFAND’S WORLD - Saturday night, the armed forces of the United States invaded a foreign country and occupied an area of its capital. The American Secretary of State and the President offered reasons for the attack, but a little listening suggests strongly that it was all a subterfuge. The president openly crowed about the potential for oil extraction from a conquered country. He repeatedly used the word “money” with respect to the outcome of the takeover, although he suggested that some of the oil money would go to the country’s occupants.
The whole thing had an eerie reminiscence to some recent history. It was Poland or it was Pearl Harbor, except that we were on the other side.
The only extenuating circumstance would appear to be that it was one fascist dictator who was attacked by our own homegrown wannabe fascist dictator.
On the other hand, this exercise appears to be just one more attempt at distracting from that other place in the southern ocean, the island once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the island that Donald Trump is now said to have visited numerous times. If nothing else, we know definitively that Trump flew on Epstein’s airplane at least 8 times. What can Trump do at this point but Wag The Dog, and a lot of people are getting killed as a result. For those who may not remember, the film Wag the Dog has the following plot line (description taken from IMDB): “Shortly before an election, a spin-doctor and a Hollywood producer join efforts to fabricate a war in order to cover up a Presidential sex scandal.”
- Election? 2026 coming up. Check
- Presidential sex scandal? Check
- Fabricate a war? Check
By the way, the excuse used repeatedly in the morning press briefing was that the foreign president and his wife have been indicted -- not in their own country but by a U.S. court. This seems to go against the idea of diplomatic immunity. It’s also a kind of great geopolitical satire, considering that Trump’s Supreme Court has given him pretty much total immunity from prosecution for whatever he does in office. Apparently this kind of immunity is not supposed to apply to the president of another country.
There is also that embarrassing bit of hypocrisy where Trump just pardoned a convicted former South American president who had been up to his ears in the drug trade. When questioned by reporters, Trump defended his pardon, but in a way that didn’t make any sense. It was the usual gobbledegook about how this poor fellow had been treated badly by the previous administration. This argument ignored the fact that the fellow had been convicted by a jury after a trial. Apparently some indictments are different than other indictments.
The president and his press conference cronies explained the timing of the invasion as depending on weather or some such. You would have thought that it was just like Eisenhower’s brave decision to start the D-Day invasion in spite of fierce tides and storms. To use that skeptical line, “Yeah, sure.”
There was also an excuse for keeping the invasion secret from our own congress. The excuse was itself almost believable – that it could have resulted in a leak – but this by itself doesn’t excuse ignoring the law. It’s also reasonable to point out that congressional leaders have, in fact, maintained secrecy after having been told of current and future military actions.
These actions taken together illustrate the use of power and violence without law.
Does this action compare directly to the second Iraq war – the one that had such miserable results – or worse yet, to Viet Nam? We’ll have to leave this question to the events of the next few months and to future historians. But there is one unequivocal conclusion, which is that this administration cares not one whit about the law, either our own or that of the international sphere. We have engaged in a military attack on a foreign country without a declaration of war by the congress, we have killed a reported 40 or more of their people, and we have kidnapped two of their citizens.
This is pretty heavy stuff. If we as a nation are going to do something like this, it better be based on a serious emergency – essentially that the other country has been preparing to engage in an act of war against us. And, the allegation better be based on evidence, rather than narcissistic emotional need. In response to the September 11 attacks, the United States searched out and destroyed terrorist training camps in foreign countries. The world understood. This is not the same. In fact, some people in the rest of the world may compare our actions to the taking of hostages by Iran back when Jimmie Carter was president. Admittedly the excuses were different and the number of those taken is different, but the Iran event is similar in respect to the disregard for international norms.
So how will the world respond to an attack which is defended by our president as the first step in grabbing a foreign nation’s oil reserves? Here is a hint: The United States along with many other nations did not accept this kind of behavior when Iraq invaded Kuwait. We treated the occupation of Kuwait as reason enough to destroy substantial parts of Hussein’s Iraq, including parts of its capital.
I’m guessing that the people who concocted this attack and bragged about it in the next morning’s press conference are reasonably well aware of this history (well, at least 2 out of the 4 men who were there) and have figured out that they need to worry about the White House and Mar a Lago, lest turnabout take its course.
The irony, as we see so often in this presidency, is that Trump is attacking someone who is as close to being a mirror image of himself as we are likely to be seeing. It’s a guy who managed to steal an election and keep himself in power. It’s a real life example of Trump’s fantasy about the 2020 election.
There has been a lot of speculation about the overall motive for the attack. The developing consensus so far is that it isn’t any one thing, but overlapping and competing interests among members of the administration. A few people have pointed out that Marco Rubio has a long standing interest in regime change in Cuba. This little invasion of a different country could be the beginning of a broader policy which would usefully be described as old fashioned American imperialism. Think of it as a trial run. There is of course the oil, of which Trump spoke so aggressively, but the numbers don’t seem to add up to anything all that substantial. It is true that Venezuela has large oil reserves, but what comes out of those wells, according to several commenters, is not of the quality that refineries like best. It has to be diluted with the better stuff and costs more to refine. This probably does not matter to Donald Trump, considering his current state of mind. To him it is just oil, and the idea of using American military might to grab it is within his limited sphere of imagination. The fact that major wars have been fought over access to oil (review the onset of the Pacific war if you like) doesn’t seem to occur to him.
One wry commenter (who unfortunately wrote under a pseudonym on a lesser known discussion site) suggested the following audacious motive: Donald Trump, it was said, hopes to make himself into a great president by being the first in more than a century to add territory to the United States. It’s been a long while since we took Texas and California (or even bought Alaska).
So that would explain a little about the talk about Greenland and Gaza, not to mention Trump’s statement that we will run Venezuela for the time being. In an era where Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild a Russian Empire, Donald Trump would appear to be doing his best to be a copycat. The sincerest form of flattery, I guess.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
