US strikes Venezuela / Captures Maduro

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 2K
  • Views: 63K
  • Politics 
Don't understand why you can't grasp that both situations are in play. It isn't one or the other. I have been consistent in that and stated that in other posts.
Meh, this is just mealy-mouthed gobbledygook. You're either not willing to parse, or not capable of parsing, what circumstances actually justified the US action so you keep bouncing between two completely unrelated things and insisting you don't have to choose. Your prior posts are not consistent at all but clearly you don't have any interest in debating this in good faith.
 
An "attack" is something that I view as the start of a war or one of many such events during a war. This wasn't a military attack on Venezuela. It was an operation, that included bombs, with the sole purpose to extracting a drug cartel leader.

I put this much more inline with droning Qasem Soleimani, which wasn't an attack on Iraq or Iran, or the exploding pagers operation by Israel, than I do a military attack.

But that's just my opinion....
So, if someone punched you in the face and you cowered with no response, you weren't attacked. Good to know.
 
Don't understand why you can't grasp that both situations are in play. It isn't one or the other. I have been consistent in that and stated that in other posts.
Because if you add 1 drop of wine to a gallon of sewage, you have a gallon of sewage.

And if you add one drop of sewage to a gallon of wine, you've got a gallon of sewage.

It's either a good reason or a shit reason, and mixing the two doesn't make shit good, but makes good things shit.
 
The past few pages of this thread exemplify a dynamic I see often in debates about U.S. power. One side relies on semantic narrowing to legitimize U.S. force, while the other keeps trying to litigate definitions as if the disagreement is primarily conceptual rather than political.

The core claim ends up never actually being confronted. Either it’s tacitly shared, or it gets obscured by constant definitional maneuvering. That claim is fairly simple: the U.S. is entitled to use violence to shape outcomes, and others are not. Everything else is just wordplay.
 
Trump wasn't required by the constitution to notify congress before snatching madura because it was a police action capturing an indicted criminal.
Wrong. Lifelong conservative David French puts it well in his column today. You can't turn an invasion into a police action just by carrying an indictment. If you could, there would never be war.
 
Which could just mean that ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile, both of which had right to develop until Chavez took over, will be guaranteed their rights back. That's us "keeping the oil".
There is no such thing as "right" independent of a legal system. What they had was a right under Venezuelan law. The Venezuelan law was changed, so their rights disappeared. The remedy for that is not military action. You best hope not: there are Chinese nationals that had the right to purchase real estate in Florida and now they do not because Florida law changed. If your position is correct, China would be justified in military action against the US

The remedy for that is don't invest in the country if you think it will change the law arbitrarily to your disadvantage. Which shows up in bond rates -- countries pay a premium above the US interest rate depending on how protective they are of rights.

But Venezuela has the right to make its own decision about that.
 
Wrong. Lifelong conservative David French puts it well in his column today. You can't turn an invasion into a police action just by carrying an indictment. If you could, there would never be war.
But there is a big difference between snatching a leader in the middle of the night, ala Noriega (or to a lesser degree, Osama bin Laden) and occupying a country, ala Iraq or Afghanistan (or to a lesser degree, Grenada). One is more in the nature of Invasion Light, not really much different than the CIA sponsored coups the USA loved to do in the 1950s-70s.
 
Trump to NBC News yesterday:

When comparing Venezuela to Iraq 23 years ago: "This time we're keeping the oil."

"A tremendous amount of money will be spent." "We're going to reimburse the oil companies."
So, the taxpayers foot the bill for taking over the country and providing security, and the payoff goes to the oil companies.
 
though I think the Barr/Trump argument is a bad one and most legal scholars disagree
It's not a bad argument. It's clearly wrong. Police actions are necessarily and definitionally jurisdictional. That is why New York cannot arrest someone in Florida; it has no jurisdiction. The way to get people from where they are to where they will be tried is extradition.

If this is a police action, then Tish James could indict DeSantis and Hochul send police to Florida to take him into custody.
 
Its about both. Doesn't have to be one or the other. No, but those criminals aren't dictators and illegitimate heads of state. Again, I think you guys are trying to apply a philosophical principle that is black and white and fails to allow for any nuance, and the world doesn't work that way. In my opinion, I think the left's disapproval is very much influenced by the dislike for trump. If obama or biden had done the same thing I don't think there would be much disapproval. In the end, the world is a safer place, russia will find it harder to generate revenue to fund its war, china and russia won't set up satellite offices 1300 miles from our coast, and neither will gain access to the largest oil deposits in the world.
Of course there would be disapproval. That's why Obama and Biden didn't do it.

The world is a much more dangerous place, not a safer place. How do you not understand that? Trump has his eye on Greenland. Well, Denmark and Europe don't want to give it up. Russia might be interested. Trump has now created a world -- it is his creation entirely -- where we might see a world war over territorial ambitions.

What's to stop France from saying it wants Louisiana back? And then invading, and pretty soon it's fucking WWIII.
 
Meh, this is just mealy-mouthed gobbledygook. You're either not willing to parse, or not capable of parsing, what circumstances actually justified the US action so you keep bouncing between two completely unrelated things and insisting you don't have to choose. Your prior posts are not consistent at all but clearly you don't have any interest in debating this in good faith.
I made my position clear in earlier posts that both situations applied. I have been completely forthcoming and absolutely posted in good faith. What I won't do is continue to argue that point. If you didn't comprehend it that's on you. Good faith goes both ways. I think we have reached the point where further discussion on this topic as of its current status isn't constructive.
 
Back
Top