I watched a Max Blumenthal video last night, made in a supermarket in
Venezuela, showing that it was filled with food. The prices are high due to
speculation and manipulation by wealthy Venezuelans and US sanctions. I also
heard an interview with an American who is currently visiting Venzuela, in
which she tells Flashpoints that the Venezuelan government is providing food
for poor people and medicine which it has purchased from Russia. The
medicine had to be purchased from Russia because the US has barred imports
of its medicine to Venezuela.
Miriam
The U.S.-Venezuela Aid Convoy Story Is Clearly Bogus, but No One Wants to
Say It
U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams. (Jose Luis Magana
/ AP)
No one actually thinks the same Donald Trump who kicked off his run for the
White House by calling Mexicans rapists, and subsequently, as president,
left Puerto Rico for dead after Hurricane Maria, cares at all about the
Venezuelan poor. No one actually thinks the murderers row of Cold
Warriorsled by two of the most extreme right-wingers in American politics,
Venezuela envoy Elliott Abrams and national security adviser John
Boltoncares at all about the starving people in Venezuela or their plight.
No one reading this, be they right, left, center, libertarian or communist,
actually buys the prevailing narrative that the U.S. is sending aid to
Venezuela as a humanitarian gesture.
So why is everyone pretending otherwise?
There are a number of reasons why these superficial narratives take hold,
but Id like to speculate on two of them.
First, the crisis in Venezuela is very real and very daunting. Without
litigating whos responsible for what, whether U.S.-led sanctions and
economic sabotage are more to blame or the economic policies of Nicolás
Maduro, one simple fact is true: The status quo is untenable. Perhaps, then,
the instinct to do something is understandable. But as with previous
crises, both organic and contrived, what that something is remains
unclear. Liberalsas they did in the build-up to the invasions of Iraq and
Libyaare easily pressured into this do something posture.
The way these things work, however, is that this vague moral directive often
involves a combination of CIA and U.S. military intervention. During the
Syrian conflict, for example, it meant U.S.- and NATO-led bombings of Syrian
forces and a tacit declaration of war under the guise of no-fly zones.
Whats never considered is a reduction or cessation of U.S. involvement, be
it CIA weapons running, wide-scale bombing campaigns, or the imposition of
sanctionsall of which prolong a given conflict or simply make it more
violent.
Because a core tenet of American liberalism is to avoid assigning blameat
worst, its adherents believe, the U.S. is run by a bunch of bumbling
do-gooderswhat the American empire is actually doing to fuel a conflict
cannot be debated, much less censured. And so the notion that we could
simply cease our crippling sanctions, which even the pro-opposition
Economist acknowledges are designed to starve the Venezuelan people, is
simply not an option.
The current something in Venezuela were all compelled to do is ensure
the arrival of a humanitarian aid convoy. The fact that the bulk of the
international aid community has either distanced itself from this PR stunt
or outright opposes it has been widely ignored by the mainstream media. One
exception is NPR, which recently reported this inconvenient truth:
The U.S. effort to distribute tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans
is more than just a humanitarian mission. The operation is also designed to
foment regime change in Venezuela which is why much of the international
aid community wants nothing to do with it. Humanitarian operations are
supposed to be neutral.
Thats why the International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations
agencies and other relief organizations have refused to collaborate with the
U.S. and its allies in the Venezuelan opposition who are trying to force
President Nicolás Maduro from power.
Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any
other objectives, Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, told a press
briefing last week in New York. The needs of the people should lead in
terms of when and how humanitarian assistance is used.
In fact, no neutral observer of international aid thinks Bolton and Abrams
convoy is anything but a mechanism to foment civil war and regime change. We
know this because high-level administration officials and their allies on
the right keep telling us thats the case. As the New York Post recently
proclaimed, U.S. delivers aid to town bordering Venezuela to undermine
President Nicolas Maduro.
Donald Trump delivered a long and rambling speech in Miami last week and
didnt once mention human rights, instead railing against the evils of
socialism. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe reflects in his new book
that Trump has openly fantasized about overthrowing Maduro, something he has
discussed in White House meetings. Thats the country we should be going to
war with, Trump said, according to McCabe. They have all that oil, and
theyre right on our back door.
Determined to maintain U.S. hegemony and control over the worlds
largest-known oil reserves, the Trump officials plotting this latest coup
arent even bothering to take its humanitarian pretext seriously. Why, then,
are purportedly centrist and liberal media outlets?
A second matter to consider is how our government has weaponized the
publics sense of morality. Since the Spanish-American War, the U.S. has
used humanitarian concerns as a shield against criticism or skepticism, and
it has more or less worked every time. Its why aid organizations like Air
America used food transports to ship guns to anti-Communists in Indochina in
the 1960s and 70s. (Weapons were code-named hard rice.) And its why
Elliott Abramsthe current quarterback of this latest affair in
Venezuelaused humanitarian aid shipments to smuggle weapons to the
Nicaraguas Contras in the 80s. Ultimately, these shipments allow for
massive military buildups, without anyone in the media or Congress asking
too many questions. After all, what kind of monster is opposed to helping
starving people?
Its impossible to know if the current shipments to Venezuela are being used
to transport weapons, although Venezuelan authorities say they have
intercepted American arms shipments. But given the history of the U.S. (to
say nothing of Abrams), and the fact that the Trump administration is
openly calling for Maduros ouster while amassing forces along the Colombian
border, its not exactly a long shot. Still, our political press dismisses
the possibility as tin-foil hat stuff, at least in part because mocking
wacky Latin American conspiracy theories is a mark of ones seriousness in
foreign policy circles.
Unlike a lot of U.S. regime change activities, reports indicate that this
latest stunt was exceptionally rushed and slapdash. The Wall Street Journal
paints a picture of a U.S. operation its architects believed would work in a
day or two:
The people who devised it in Caracas and sold it here [in Washington], sold
it with the promise that if Guaidó made a move and [South American
countries] and the U.S. came in behind, the military would flip and Maduro
would go, said a former senior U.S. official. They thought it was a
24-hour operation.
Because the large-scale military defections expected never took place (as
they almost never do), the U.S. has had to resort to its Plan B for
promoting conflict and galvanizing the Venezuelan opposition: On Sat., Feb.
23, President of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó will carry out a
humanitarian avalanche at the Venezuelan border with Colombia and Brazil
that, when one reads the fine print, sounds a lot like a U.S.-led invasion.
Billionaire Richard Branson is reportedly organizing a humanitarian aid
concert the night before. But we know this is a fig leaf, and we know this
because those running this operation say so again and again. Bolton himself
has speculated that Maduro could end up in a beach area like Guantanamo.
Despite all the evidence before them, MSNBC, CNN and countless other
networks and publications across the ideological spectrum refuse to frame
this humanitarian gambit as an act of hostility. Instead, knowing what they
know and who they are covering, they have largely portrayed Trump, Bolton
and Abrams as champions of the Venezuelan people.
It goes without saying that hundreds of thousands are suffering in
Venezuela, and the instinct to alleviate that suffering is a healthy one.
But a craven marketing stunt by far-right Cold Warriorswithout any buy-in
from actual aid organizationscannot be taken at face value.
Just as the U.S. military has made calls to high-ranking Venezuelan
officials, I am writing directly to the editors, television producers and
reporters of our most prominent news outlets. Im asking you to defect and
come to the side of the patently obvious. Unlike the Pentagon, I cant bribe
you or promise you amnesty, but I can appeal to your basic sense of
integrity and intellectual honesty: At best, you are helping provide cover
for a campaign designed to starve the Venezuelan people; at worst, you are
enabling a military conflict that will drag on for years.
One does not need to hold any normative opinions about the fate of Venezuela
to be able to identify a naked PR campaign when they see one. Journalists
with blue checkmarks on Twitter must say so before this gets any further out
of hand.
Adam H. Johnson
Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
and is co-host of the Citations Needed
Adam H. Johnson
