The U.S. president is openly tying Nicolás Maduro to narco-terror networks and cartel structures, while dangling both “talks” and threatening the use of military force in the same breath. It’s all pushing toward the culmination of crowning Maduro and his government America’s next top “terrorists” — the magic movie-script label that means the bombs can start heating up.
Then comes the media warm-up act: a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens, published on Monday, assuring readers in “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro” that this is all modest, calibrated, even reasonable.
“The serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse,” Stephens writes. “Intervention means war, and war means death. … The law of unintended consequences is unrepealable.”
The column’s argument is simple: Relax. This isn’t Iraq, a conflict Stephens helped cheerlead our way into and proudly declared in 2023 that two decades later, he doesn’t regret supporting the war.
When the Kuwaiti girl talking about Iraqis killing babies turned out to be a US plant during the first Bush reign, that was enough to get me to start asking what the US game plan was, and what the real motivations in the Middle East were. And I was old enough to remember who installed Hussein.
So when Bush II came along, I was expecting the action, just waiting to see what the excuse would be. And the excuse didn’t match the action; there was already a UN delegation that could have helped Iraq clean up the remaining agents with no involvement of US troops.
And of course, there was no reason to attack Iraq because of a Saudi who successfully attacked the US was hiding somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.