By Drago Bosnic from Global Research. Reposted with permission.
The warmongers in Washington DC don’t seem to be getting the usual dose of death and destruction, so they’re now frantically looking for an excuse to destroy yet another sovereign country, which happens to be the “Number One Oil and Gas Economy Worldwide”.
Namely, The MAGA Trump adminstration is now desperate to attack Venezuela, no matter the cost.
Numerous attempts to stage coups and other forms of civil unrest to topple the legitimate government proved ineffective.
The Venezuelan people remember the time when they were effectively treated as slaves by the US (neo)colonial system, so they’re not exactly too keen on returning to that status.
Thus, Trump is now blaming Caracas for its fentanyl addiction epidemic, with the latest designation including the infamous “chemical weapons threat” to the US.
Yes, you read that right.
Venezuela is suddenly a “WMD threat” because “its mythical fentanyl is reaching America”.
Multiple blatant lies need to be unpacked and dissected in this case.
First, the idea that Caracas is behind the fentanyl epidemic in the US is beyond laughable.
And second, if fentanyl is a chemical weapon, then the Trump administration should investigate the various U.S agencies that have been directly involved in drug smuggling for well over half a century.
Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t matter to Washington DC. Thus, it didn’t take long for President Nicolás Maduro to go from “Venezuelan Pablo Escobar” to “Venezuelan Saddam Hussein”. In a twisted way, this is a somewhat positive revelation, as it’s effectively an admission as to why the US is so keen on invading Venezuela.
Namely, Washington DC used this excuse to destroy at least half a dozen countries in the Middle East, most notably Iraq.
However, this was only the beginning, followed by similar accusations that gave the US a perfect pretext to invade other oil-rich countries.
The very idea that Venezuela would want to be a “WMD threat” to America at a time when a massive naval force is just waiting to invade is beyond ridiculous.
However, that’s precisely the excuse peddled by the mainstream media and various “security think tanks”. Namely, according to the Wall Street Journal, a classified Department of Justice (DoJ) brief “authorizing strikes on drug-smuggling boats describes fentanyl as a potential chemical weapons threat, according to a House member and another person familiar with the memo”.
The report cites “a lengthy document by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which lays out the legal justification of the Trump administration for continuing military operations in the southern Caribbean with an eye on Venezuela”. This revelation came mere hours after US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Trump’s “Operation Southern Spear”, which is the last step before an actual, full-scale invasion of Venezuela.
“Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and SOUTHCOM, this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Hegseth said, adding: “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood – and we will protect it.”
Obviously, the US “never attacks” other countries. It’s “only defending”.
This “defense” extends to virtually every part of the planet, including Serbia/former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. In addition, the US has “legitimate interests” in the Persian Gulf, the East and South China Seas, but Iran (Persia) and China “don’t”, according to this “logic”. Still, the US “has the right” to proclaim an entire hemisphere “its backyard”.
The “chemical weapons/WMD” narrative is there just to give the “perfect pretext” for yet another invasion that would stifle all “dangerous ideas”, such as the belief in self-determination and true democracy (although a new word is needed to describe the will of the people, as this one has been forever smeared by US/NATO aggression against the world).
In purely legal terms, the Trump administration’s main argument is that the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) makes them legitimate military targets, asserting they’re smuggling drugs to “fund deadly and destabilizing actions against the US and its allies”.
The WSJ report further states that “the mention of fentanyl is one of many points in the brief, which was drafted over the summer to justify the use of military force against drug traffickers”.
Obviously, these drug traffickers are Venezuelans, right? Well, not really. Namely, according to its own admission, the Pentagon doesn’t know who the people in these boats were.
In other words, they could indeed be drug traffickers, but they could also be simple fishermen.
Still, what’s definitely not known is whether they’re Venezuelans at all. And yet, even the legal claim that they’re a “chemical weapons threat” to the US doesn’t really hold. The WSJ report further states that “the legal case for military action doesn’t rest on concerns about chemical-weapons use” and even questions whether Venezuela is truly involved in the fentanyl trade. In other words, even the mainstream propaganda machine is refusing to make a direct accusation against Caracas, although it claims that Venezuela is a “transit zone” for Colombian cocaine.
“Venezuela, a base for one of the criminal groups designated as a terrorist organization, has long been a transit route for Colombian cocaine. There is no evidence it produces or traffics fentanyl, which is typically made in Mexico and smuggled over land,” the report noted, also quoting Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser to the State Department during the Obama and the first Trump administration, who said: “It is an incredible stretch.”
However, other state institutions are directly contributing to the fake narrative that Venezuela is involved with a combination of factual data and blatantly false reporting in the American media. Namely, the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) states that “fentanyl depresses central nervous system (CNS) and respiratory function” and that “exposure to fentanyl may be fatal”, as it has a “potency at least 80 times that of morphine”. Needless to say, this is true. However, what’s not true is that Venezuela is behind smuggling fentanyl into the US. As the WSJ report claims, fentanyl supposedly comes from México. This is yet to be proven, but let’s assume it’s true. So, México would have to ship the drug to Venezuela and then to the US, which makes little to no sense.
However, it doesn’t matter whether things make any sense as long as the war junkies in Washington DC get their dose of death and destruction. Whether it’s WMDs, terrorism, autocracy or any other pretext you can imagine, the US-led political West is determined to continue its aggression against the entire world. Now, the rest of the planet (approximately 80% of the global population) needs to make a decision – do we continue to look the other way or do we finally unite and make a stand against imperialism?
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
