Comment by xg15
3 days ago
Honestly, I'm getting increasingly fascinated with the utterly absurd logic that states are putting into their justifications for war.
You get "preemptive self defense" that urgently requires "buffer zones" on foreign territory, which then mysteriously become your own territory and have to be defended with even more buffer zones.
Some Terror Regime of Literal Nazis is doing Unspeakable Atrocities to its own population which practically forces you to invade the country purely out of empathy and the goodness of your heart. Nevermind that the population has never asked for the invasion and will in fact be worse off through the war than before - and that this other state who is your ally is doing the exact same things, but then it's suddenly "realpolitik" and just the way the world works.
Someone has broken the law of his own country. "Internal affairs" or grounds for invasion? Depends if he is your ally or enemy.
Pardon the cynicism, but my growing impression is that war justifications only serve as discussion fodder for domestic audiences and have very little to do with the actual war.
> war justifications only serve as discussion fodder for domestic audiences and have very little to do with the actual war.
Two things intersect here:
"War is the continuation of politics by other means" - Carl von Clausewitz
"Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex" - Frank Zappa
There's a third quote that kinda sums it all up neatly: "War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it." — George Orwell
The media in the US, being a wholesale production of the oligarchy now, has been brazenly honest about the fact that this is purely a large-scale looting of Venezuela.
Those are some good quotes.
Just speculating, but I wonder if there is another purpose as well: To hand the military a story it can tell itself to assure they are still the "good guys" - i.e. ensuring "troop morale".
If you have thousands and thousands of servicemembers, not all of them might submit to drill or be motivated by money or career advancements or other personal goals - some people might ask questions about the bigger picture, about why they are doing an operation, etc. I imagine for situations like this, it's useful for an officer to have some ready-made answers available that they can use to counter those questions, even if the answers really don't make a lot of sense.
For all the personnel who executed the Maduro operation, the "we're just helping law enforcement to arrest a criminal" story was probably the practical reality for the last months, no matter how ridiculous it is in the larger context.