One of the most flawlessly executed special forces operations of the last half-century took place in 1979 when Soviet commandos stormed Afghanistan’s heavily defended presidential palace, killing Hafizullah Amin and several of his top aides. This allowed Moscow to install a replacement government much more congenial to its interests, though the result was the long Afghanistan war against Muslim guerillas.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, elderly and decrepit and not long for this world, must have felt tremendous pride at that successful action, as did his equally superannuated Politburo colleagues. I’m sure they all believed it demonstrated that the Soviet Union and its powerful military were still just as robust and vigorous as all their propagandistic Pravda editorials always proclaimed.

But despite that momentary military success, the Soviet economy and political system continued to decay. Just a dozen years later the USSR collapsed and disintegrated, with its Russian successor state soon entering one of the worst periods in its entire national history.

I think that lesson of the past should be kept in mind as the Trump Administration and its mindless sycophants currently crow over their successful seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The latter are now rather bizarrely being brought to trial in Manhattan federal district court, with one of the charges against that foreign head of government apparently being that he had been in possession of illegal firearms.

No Monty Python skit would have ever dared include such outlandish elements.

Our dramatic kidnapping of the Venezuelan president followed the recent blockade we had imposed on his country and the resulting seizure of various large Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas, doing so based upon our unilateral declaration that they had been “sanctioned.” In proudly taking credit for those blatant acts of international piracy, President Donald Trump had boasted at his press conference a couple of weeks ago that he planned to keep the oil or possibly sell it.

Then at yesterday’s press conference announcing his triumphant seizure of President Maduro, Trump declared that America will now control Venezuela and our country will “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves, which he stated were rightfully ours.

While neither I nor anyone else can be entirely sure what the American president meant by those bold statements, they do seem to set a uniquely dangerous precedent for international relations between supposedly sovereign nations.

In recent weeks, Trump’s Venezuelan policies have led some of his critics to condemn him for returning to President Theodore Roosevelt’s notorious “Gunboat Diplomacy” of the early twentieth century. But such accusations are entirely false. Neither America nor any other civilized country had ever taken such bizarre and lawless actions at any time during the twentieth century nor for hundreds of previous years. Or at least nothing along such lines comes to mind.

Noted military expert Col. Douglas Macgregor expressed a great deal of concern over this outrageous behavior of the country he’d long served:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfA20zBIUGs

In an excellent interview with Norwegian academic Glenn Diesen not long after Trump’s public announcements, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University emphasized the totally lawless nature of current American policy. Trump simply takes whatever actions happen to come into his head, doing so while nothing is heard from Congress, the United Nations, or any other legal body that might normally weigh in on such matters.

READ MORE: 

https://www.unz.com/runz/puncturing-the-propaganda-bubble-of-the-ussa-and-its-eussr-vassals/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecttIN07U-c