This seems like a statement of the bleeding obvious by Secretary of State Tillerson:
“In the history of Venezuela and in fact the history in other Latin American and South American countries, often times, it is the military that handles that,” Tillerson said.
“When things are so bad that the military leadership realizes that it just can’t serve the citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition,” he said. But he added: “Whether that will be the case here or not, I do not know.”
Oh good grief:
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's first tour of Latin America got off to a rocky start on Friday with U.S. ally Mexico distancing itself from his suggestion that Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro could be toppled by his own military.
Tillerson ruffled feathers across the region on the eve of his five-nation tour with comments in Texas defending 19th century U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and suggesting the Venezuelan army could manage "a peaceful transition" from Maduro.
It's better for Maduro to fully destroy Venezuela in order to save his corrupt regime and make it fully authoritarian without even a pretense of having free and fair elections with rule of law?
Because if people are in a tizzy about potential American intervention (highly unlikely except for humanitarian relief) and nobody in the region seems eager or capable of intervening, the only alternative to an American intervention or continued thug rule is a coup or a revolution.
A revolution could be very bloody, and a military coup--as undesirable in principle that such a solution is--is the best-case solution at this point, even if we don't know when democracy would return after that event.
But no, get in a friggin' tizzy that our secretary of state said the obvious rather than pretend some magical force will save Venezuela.
Venezuela might have been spared this destruction at the hands of the idiotic Chavez-Maduro regimes if the 2002 coup attempt had actually succeeded.
We should wish that America had actually supported the coup which would have rewritten the past 16 years.
But recall that if we had helped the coup leaders succeed back then, that intervention would have led to ruffled feathers in the region and among the global Left every time an American secretary of state visited the region.
Yes indeed, we'd have endured sad tales of how brutal America prevented Venezuela from reaching the heights of prosperity and equality that Hugo's brand of socialism could have built on the solid foundation of the world's largest petroleum reserves! It would have been one more damning indictment of America's long role in Latin America.
UPDATE: Strategypage describes the descent of once prosperous Venezuela to the cusp of "catastrophic collapse." Socialism and corruption proved capable of negating even immense oil wealth.
UPDATE: Venezuelans flee their country for a chance at even begging for help:
They left their jobs, homes and all their worldly possessions behind, and now have to beg on the streets all day just to gather enough coins to sleep under a roof at night. But many Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia still say they are better off than they were before they crossed the border.
Tip to Instapundit.
Driving potential enemies away suits Maduro and his socialist thugs just fine, I suppose.
