Al Jazeera has been super loud and vocal about how US aggressions towards Venezuela is all about oil. It makes sense since Venezuela’s future oil exports in case the current regime falls will hugely impact the price of oil which funds Qatar which funds Al Jazeera.
The real insanity is that nearly everyone, on "both sides", now agrees the US invasion of Iraq was a terrible outcome and a terrible idea built on lies about "weapons of mass destruction".
Despite all of that this admin is using the exact same rhetoric while needing to redefine a drug, that largely is imported from places other than Venezuela, to make it a "weapon of mass destruction" in order to do it all over again.
When US initiates aggressive unilateral military action on other sovereign countries, US bad yes, of course.
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, the US did do some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
No, that's not at all what I said, read it back please.
My point is that history has shown that such action is extremely counterproductive if you actually care about doing good for people under such regimes, particularly when the decision is made impulsively by a single country with a biased perspective and no consistent system or criteria to make sure it's a smart thing to do.
Anyone that supports such action is using inconsistent moralistic arguments to justify blatant power grabs. It may be well intentioned, but you are just making yourself feel good by fighting the bad guys, while doing even more harm to innocent people and making it all worse in the long-run. Very American indeed.
And frankly, right now, the US is not exactly in a position to be a judge of what is moral in the first place.
History has also shown dictators engaging is mass genocide like in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, RDC, etc. I am not sure that the idea that leaving dictators alone does less harm to their people is a lesson from history.
Read my comment back as well! I am saying this is neither a moral nor legal matter. So I am not using a moralistic argument.
US foreign policy goals are self serving like every other country. And it has supported lesser of two evils many times (like a non communist dictatorship vs a communist one).
I don’t think the Iraq war was to establish democracy, it was to get rid of a dictator hostile to the US at a time when after 9/11, the US decided to it would not tolerate further aggressions. But a byproduct of that policy has been the establishment of a democracy and historically the US considered that democracies as natural allies and therefore the more the better.
In practice, just the act supporting the lesser of the two evils has brought so much more evil.
If you want to do good, fine, but make sure you are smart about it and actually achieve that aim. The US has shown that its not good at this, regardless of intentions, they should just refrain from action until they get their shit together.
Oh, no, that's just a macro observation of the countries that the US desperately feels the need to regime change. (Fortunately, fellow travelers can always be found to retroactively support such activity.)
The part that's relevant to what you said in your post is the second half of mine.
Sounds like you are pleading for an international intervention in the US as Trump tramples all over the constitution, indulges in blatant corruption and sends troops onto the streets :-)
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
I don't think you should laugh. Not even a tiny grin is appropriate.
Come and see.[0] Watch desperate mother whose son was grabbed on the street and "busified"[1]. She later died in the ER after the stroke she suffered.
Just found some random telegram channel for you which apparently collects the videos of Ukrainian forced mobilization[2]. The channel's admins sarcastically call them "volunteers" which I find despicable, but just watch the videos. Some of the videos have logos of popular Ukrainian telegram channels, you can find them there.
No just the first part, China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil, minerals and power half around the world. Iraq and whole surrounding region became a hellhole due and only due to US failed invasion, gave the world ISIS and screwed entire region badly for decades to come. Afghanistan became (again) a hellhole due to failed US invasion too, 0 positive long term things achieved, just death all around.
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
Ok. Then the question is "If the US really goes full isolationsist and packs it home, who takes the power vaccum?"
> China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil
I didn't say that "China handling it" is about invading anything. I also didn't say anything that the US is justified in invading Venezuela. I am just wondering that if those saying "the US shouldn't do anything" understand that someone will do something, even if this something is stupid, counterproductive or plain evil.
The problem with your argument is there are dictators all over the world the US ignores. If anti-dictator is enough, why the tepid response for Ukraine? What about the various African nations? What about Haiti and the violence there?
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
It's not that easy/clear. Venezuelan oil is really poor quality, needs lots of refining, and is thus only profitable only when the price per barrel is on the higher end.
So Qatar (which mostly exports natural gas anyways), Saudi Arabia, etc. can just dump oil at a cheaper price to make it unprofitable to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
US decision makers salivating over war/oil/whatever def don't take that into account, but it really doesn't matter either.
This doesn't mean that they are wrong. We should not have another was for the petrodollar. We have enough suffering in this planet. We should not only not create more, but actively try to reduce it.
It's an interesting perspective, and looking back at history I'm inclined to believing that. A question about those refineries for heavy crude oil: isn't that possible to adapt the oil plants to lighter oil? Or would that mean rebuilding the whole facility?
You end up with useless processors, and you are working against the market. Converting increases the demand for light and decreases the demand for heavy, which will at least directionally improve the supply cost advantage of the heavy.
Except Qatar doesn't really have much Oil? They produce Gas which a different beast and used mostly for electricity or heating. They are also not friendly (actually hostile) to Saudis or the UAE; so they can't be working on this by proxy.
Have you considered that they are doing this because of humans right and .. /s who are we kidding this is Qatar we are talking about.
My only explanation of this, is that the collapse of the "order-based" system affects countries like Qatar disproportionately as part of their existence hangs on the respect of that order.
