Comment by stusmall
5 days ago
> The people in Venezuela want democracy. It's a fundamentally different situation.
"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" - Dick Cheney (but I'm sure it'll work out this time)
There is a whole lot of directions this can go after we arrest the dictator, but a liberal democracy magically immediately popping isn't on my list. There might be one in the future but there will be a lot of chaos and violence between now and then.
What happened in Europe after WW2? Dick Cheney didn't invent the idea of America liberating a country and being greeted as liberators, it had happened before, specifically in countries that had a history of liberal democracy.
For some reason he thought it would apply to Islamic theocracies and it clearly didn't. Pattern matching Venezuela against Iraq or Afghanistan is an obvious mistake.
We aren't occupying Venezuela and rooting out everyone in the current regime and putting them on trial. We just arrested a handful of people leaving the rest of the government intact. It playing out like WW2 doesn't make sense
Trump has today, explicitly said that the US administration - specifically his administration - will run Venezuela, with boots on the ground, for as long as is necessary.
3 replies →
> What happened in Europe after WW2? Dick Cheney didn't invent the idea of America liberating a country and being greeted as liberators, it had happened before, specifically in countries that had a history of liberal democracy.
Those countries were actually being liberated from a foreign power that had invaded them just a few years prior.
There are very few examples where a foreign nation overthrowing the indigenous government (no matter how despised that government may be) are greeted as liberators, and in those select few instances the sentiment is almost universally short lived.