A Truman-Era solution for Venezuela

About all morning, your old columnist, with a military background, had been watching accounts of our special forces foray into Venezuela to capture dictator Nicolas Maduro and his equally terrible wife. President Trump offered Maduro a way out, but oh no, he insisted on going the hard way. The President and his staff explained the flawless event at a news conference a little before noon.

I was a bit surprised to hear President Trump then explain how we, the U.S., were going to send in military governors to put the country back into a democratic society before we turn it back over to self-governing. At the end of WWII, under President Truman, we did something similar in West Germany and Japan. We called it the Marshal Plan, and it was a great success. Compare West Germany to East Germany, under the thumb of the USSR until it collapsed.

Now I predict that the Democrats and all those affected with TDS (I repeat myself) will raise holy hell. They will call it un-American, a dictatorship and on and on, but have no better solutions to propose.

Oh yes. For example, one comment by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was about how wrong it was to invade a country and abduct its president just to take over their oil! Evidently, she missed the part about trafficking drugs to kill over 100,000 young Americans. She wasn’t alone, but as suspected.

What Truman did in Germany was to assign older U.S. military officers to West Germany as “Governors” of different political divisions, like our counties. Those gentlemen rooted out the former Nazis and other undesirables and had them locked up or sent out of the country. Then they set up representative local governments much like what we have in our U.S. today. General MacArthur went to Japan to do the same. Then, when those local governments began to operate in a democratic fashion, our U.S. personnel backed out and departed the scene. The USSR, of course, continued its dictatorship in East Germany with terrible results for those people.

A lot of years ago, my father found one old retired gentleman, a relative who lived in Maine at the time. Visiting him, he showed us one of his uniforms, WWI era, complete with jeweled rendition pilot wings that were traditional prior to the medal style that I wore. I remember not his name, but he described what it was like to be a military governor in West Germany. How normal German citizens gladly pointed out their neighbors who had helped the Nazis and testified against them in court. Under Trump, the same can happen in Venezuela, where ordinary citizens will point out their neighbors who made money in the drug trade and are no longer welcome in their society. Fellow New Yorkers need to pay attention.

Under Trump, the temporary governors in Venezuela will depart when that country gets its act together, again. We should have done the same in Haiti, as I proposed at the time, and so would have avoided the terrible mess that small country is today. It worked for the losers in WWII, and it will work in Venezuela.

Yes, Venezuela was rich in oil production until taken over and socialized by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Like any Communist (democratic socialist) country in history, the common people suffered, and those in charge got rich. Oil production has decreased to a drizzle, and a million or so Venezuela citizens left the country rather than starve to death. A majority of those people who left have immigrated to the United States, and TV has shown them in the streets of Florida celebrating Maduro’s capture.

President Trump has been a little vague in what will be done with the oil tankers captured already and future production, but I suspect that the oil will be sold on the open market and the proceeds will be funneled back into Venezuela’s economy to relieve the plight of the ordinary people who were too poor to leave. I am sure that the oil companies that developed the oil industry but had it stolen from them by Chavez will gladly return to their stolen facilities and quickly get them back into production. Hopefully, Venezuela will return to being one of the richest countries in South America and again will be a great friend of our beloved USofA.

When the U.S. takes over governing Venezuela, there will be a fair number of Generals who have become rich from the drug trade and will need to be kicked out of the country. Comments on TV have indicated that those undesirables may be accepted by Russia after being kicked out of Venezuela. We’ll see.

That is how I saw it.