Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be heading to the UN Security Council Saturday
with a very clear agenda: trying to sell the 15 members on recognizing
Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s president, instead of Nicolas Maduro. This is
unlikely to happen uniformly, as Russia and China have already
expressed support for Maduro.
This is part of an ever-escalating Trump Administration plan to try to
sell the world on Venezuela’s regime change. Some US allies are on
board, but there are still some countries that are not.
It’s to the point where President Trump says “all options are on the table”
against Maduro, with the immediate focus being some way to divert
Venezuela’s money from oil exports to Guaido, instead of the Maduro
government.
John Bolton was setting that out as a priority earlier in the week,
though he conceded that officials weren’t clear yet how that would be
accomplished. Citgo, Venezuela’s main foreign energy asset, is already gearing up for a fight,
envisioning attempts at the company being taken over on behalf of the
Guaido government, or otherwise trying to hijack their revenue stream
before it gets back to Venezuela.
Mr Trump responded to a question about possible military intervention by saying:
“We’re not considering anything, but all options are on the table.”
Would it really hurt to use the full quote? It’s actually more informative not less.
They always say “all options are on the table” that’s a given. They might have an option for dropping a giant octopus on them for all we know.
What was interesting to me was the first part and I think that was fairly honest. A military attack is probably not going to be an option that Trump is willing to take. Although I’m pretty sure he would like to bully the guy from office and call it a big win for gunboat diplomacy and “democracy” at the same time. (which is kind of ironic if you think about it)
The first part of the quote becomes meaningless when the second part of the quote is the same tired phrase used to intimidate the poor unfortunates we have in our crosshairs at any given time. I’ll also use the old whataboutism and ask you if you would have thought the same way if Obama or Clinton had used that term. Or should I say did you feel the same way when Obama and Hillary DID use that term? After all it’s been our go to phrase of intimidation for decades.
Whatever man, when he invades Venezuela I’ll admit you are right, in the meantime he hasn’t invaded and he did in fact say “we’re not considering anything” and there was no reason to ignore that part because it is the unusual part of the comment. And yes when any of them said “all options are on the table” I took it with a grain of salt no matter who it came from because it is the standard line, it always has been for my entire life. It’s never meant anything as long as I can remember because it’s used both when they want to invade and when they do not want to invade. A common phrase that is tossed out under all conditions tells us nothing.
“All options” in boilerplate. Saying “We’re not considering anything” is not standard fair and it’s often the toss out comment that is most telling. He essentially blurted out that they are not planning to invade, now I’ll eat crow if he does but will you admit you are wrong if he doesn’t? Of course not, you will just move on to claiming he’s a war monger for some other reason.
It’s a term we use to intimidate others. I didn’t say Trump was going to invade. Iran has been one of those poor unfortunates that has been in our “crosshairs” for years and we still haven’t invaded them. What he said beforehand doesn’t change the meaning of the term whether or not he invades Venezuela.
Listen, you have a table it has options on it, right? Still following me? You can be considering some of them and not others. Get it? He said he wasn’t considering a military option. Why is that so hard to understand? The first part of the sentence is important and to drop the entire first half means you are taking it out of context.
And yes it is a term used to intimidate others, it’s called gunboat diplomacy. I didn’t say I liked it, just that it’s not the same as invading a country. And when it’s qualified with “we’re not considering anything” that’s kind of important context, but like I said, whatever man. If you want to ignore what he actually said and think that by ignoring his actual words that it provides a fuller context, go right ahead. I can’t stop you from being dumb, not since you insist.
He NEVER said he wasn’t considering a military option. Him saying “we’re not considering anything” would have indeed included the military option but he followed that up with “all options are on the table” which INCLUDES military options. He was actually being redundant. Saying all options are on the table is another way of saying we haven’t made a decision yet. If we were already taking action, whether it be military force, sanctions or whatever, those options would no longer “be on the table”, we’d be doing them. And since you admit that it is a term of intimidation, I guess you’re agreeing with me. So who is the dumb one here?
No, he’s just being vague as usual.
“We’re not considering anything, but all options are on the table.” translates to
“We’re telling you that we’re not *currently* considering anything, but we retain the option to take whatever course of action we deem necessary in the future.”
The first part of that sentence is meaningless. Remove it from the sentence, and the sentence means the same thing. We reserve the right to do whatever we like for whatever reason.
So less information is more information, so long as ignoring some information fits the narrative. Kind of like the mind reading trick I see a lot.
Shock and Awe-ctopus? Yeah… I think they meant bombs.
Actually all options means just that; All Option (everything from drones to nukes to assassination to sanctions to doing nothing and everything you can imagine in between).
They do in fact war game some of the craziest options possible. Any of those options are “on the table” at all times, only a very few are actually being considered. Trump said they are not considering the use of military force, that doesn’t mean that it’s not still an “option”. Anything can be an option including dropping a giant octopus on them. It’s a stupid option that nobody is actually entertaining but it’s an option. See what I mean? I would assume that some people are entertaining the idea of invading, so it’s a little more likely than dropping an octopus but then again so are about a hundred other options that don’t include dropping bombs at all.
My point is that options can be anything, but when asked specifically about the use of the military he said they are not considering that specifically but that it’s an option. Well isn’t it always and in all instances an option? Well in this case it’s an option that apparently they are not currently considering or at least Trump isn’t.
Mmm, so considerations are not optional, and, options are considerations. Or is it the other way around…
No dipshit you can have options you are considering, some you are not really considering at this time, some that you are not really considering at all, etc. Is that really so hard to understand. That’s rhetorical, obviously for a dumbass like you it is too hard to understand.
One more time more slowly; You have a table, on that table are options, some of them you are considering some you are not. Right now Trump just said he is NOT considering that Option, even though it’s still obviously one of his options. You of course prefer to ignore the word NOT and instead inject your own mind-reading and claim he meant something else. But that’s because you are a dipshit and nobody expects more from people such as yourself. Why bother with what he actually said when you know what he meant right? LOL Dumbass
Glad you find it amusing. If trump is not considering anything, indeed, if he even can, or will, how does he know there are any options, or even a table ?
The guy who chastises people for calling others names just called you a dipshit. Oh and dumbass. Gotta love the hypocrite bastard.
Well, like spanky, Box is very good at words..l may be a dumbass, but at least I know when a piss poor salesman is blowing smoke up mine.
So in your world there’s no such thing as a lie ? Jesus man, you pose as anti war and can’t even understand that sanctions are war just like covert agents perpetuating a coup inside a sovereign nation ?
Quit trying to portray this charlatan of being anti war please, it really won’t work due to the fact he’s increased the level of violence in every conflict as well as the sanctions that kill while supporting apartheid and autocracies who are complicit in crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Inverted TDS strikes again !!!!!
When you have to use ad hominen attacks it pretty much proves you are relying upon emotions instead of logic.
Of course there are lies and it’s possible he was lying that’s still no excuse for only printing half his sentence. If you are simply going to assume everything he says is a lie then don’t bother printing any of it.
And why should I stop telling the truth as I see it? Can’t you either skip my comments and mind your own business or refute them? Why must I stop commenting?
And I don’t “have to use personal attacks” I use personal attacks because I have been personally attacked by these dipshits so it is personal. I’m not pretending my personal attacks on them are anything other than personal attacks. They are not part of my argument they are just me treating them like the Pieces of crap they are because I can. And again if you don’t like it, go read someone else’s comments.
And by the way, I am not in favor of this move in the least, I don’t support it and I have said over and over that we should mind our own business. That’s not the same as saying this is an invasion. When anti-war people choose to be dishonest in their quotes and take Trump out of context that does NOT help our movement. As soon as anyone sees that half a quote above and then reads the full quote they will know they were “baited” or basically trolled. That’s not a great way to run a site or to try and recruit new anti-war people.
And as for Trump he isn’t an non-interventionist and I have NEVER claimed he is. He is a “realist” that’s a different group from the neo-cons and better. He’s not anti-war, he’s not a neo-con he’s in the middle. By the way, I claim only that he is better than our past several presidents and I make that claim and I back it up.
It looks like Trump might very well end at least three wars without starting any new ones. That’s not perfect but if YOU can’t see it’s better than our past presidents then you are either blind or ignorant.
I did refute your lack of logic when I pointed out he could be lying.
No one said you had to quit commenting, my meaning was for you to quit cheer leading for this pathological liar.
It’s very revealing that you feel the need to resort to name calling to defend your ignorant blind faith to the current war criminal in the oval office.
Keep up the mental gymnastics you need to justify your delusion that the reality tv show host and his swamp creatures are going to save you though, you wear it so well….
5th columns on the march… or slithering.
Is staying the F out of it one of those “options”?
That’s what the idiot said before I voted for him. Oh well back to not voting. I won’t make that mistake again no matter what the consequences.
I guess all options are definitely on the table now. Elliot Abrams? Unf**kingbelievable.
100% proof late-night Pence phone call directed coup https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/25/confirming-us-orchestration-report-details-pences-key-phone-call-venezuelan
didn’t we just run a coup in Ukraine that seemed to break that country apart . Why do we want to hurt Venezuela too .
Didn’t you know? We’re the bad guys now.
We’ve always been the bad guys.
Yeah. It just keeps on getting crazier every day. Every neo-con retread is showing up. Who knows what the next overturned DC rock will uncover…
Might as well get the big Dick back in the game. And Kissinger while he’s still wasting good oxygen.
This is all happening in the context of establishment Dems still all upset about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the Repubs trying to disguise their lust for the biggest oil reserves on the planet with phony concerns about the poor Venezuelan people. The hypocrisy going on here is breathtaking, wars.
Why not just send Satan himself, if he’s not to busy with the Middle East?
I wish we would just mind our own business. Please leave Venezuela alone!
Hey by the way, does Venezuela have any IMF debt? I think they don’t, which is maybe why we want to attack them?
I understand Venezuela has almost 2 billion in England that has been frozen . This 31 tons of gold in England is also frozen . It sure should good collateral for IMF loan .
“Prager University” (a neocon astroturf organization, which has no campus and gives out no degrees) is putting out well-timed youtube ads including attacking Venezuela and socialism. Each video costs $50k.
I recently posted about this including a link to their video and it disappeared, apparently assumed to be spam by a disqus algorithm. So note that if a comment vanishes, it’s not necessarily antiwar.com moderators doing so. Disqus allows you to flag such comments as not-spam, but who knows when some human will confirm that.
I saw a comment in spam linking to a Prager U video a couple of days ago, and approved the comment. I’ll be checking the spam folders again shortly for any such content. The Disqus spam algorithm is weird. Sometimes it catches video links, sometimes it doesn’t, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to which sometimes.
Thanks for the info, and I’m glad someone attentive like yourself has access to flag appropriately. They say there is no such thing as bad press, so maybe anything that links to their one-sided paid-for lies really is spam. 🙂
Once again, the assumption is that regime change will happen in Venezuela out in the open for all to see. Consider what happened to democracy in Iran back in 1953 where CIA operatives carried out a covert operation resulting in the overthrow and death of Mosaddegh and the installation of the Shah. This was not acknowledged by the US government until some 60 years later. My guess is the same thing will happen in Venezuela despite what Congress and the president have to say about it.
The jig is kinda up when Trump not only officially and openly recognizes the opposition leader, openly sends Pompeo to the UN to twist arms against Maduro, but then also appoints Elliott Abrams, dirty-deed-doer well known for his support of right wing death squads in the Americas in the 70s and 80s, to take care of the issue.
Not so easy with Russian Wagner Group mercs protecting Maduro.
Lets hope so. I’m so sick of my country now. Be happy If somebody put us in our place. We need to be slapped down so we can start working on the important problems this country and its people need to face.
The consensus is – even from Putin and Xi, judging from their actions – is that the American people and their allies need to do their own slapping down of their extremists.
A genuine multi-polar world means all nations are self-responsible and diplomatically accountable to high standards without the extreme coercion of armed open or clandestine interventions, or severe economic and diplomatic humiliations. Should aggression continue to be the only way of doing business, that will only lead to abuse and dangerous competition to be the new global strongman.
So, Putin will enter into Syria, and now Venezuela, but only just enough to deter U.S. aggression and not outright hammer them. China will endure a trade war and diplomatic humiliations with appropriate rhetoric, but not outright crash the U.S. dollar and economy.
History will show whether this softer approach worked, or was failed appeasement to as-yet unknown cost.
Thank you for the well thought out comment. Just sick of seeing the same old same old going on 60 yrs. now. Seeing other sentient beings in pain is not a pleasent experience for me.
In a world of conflict and contrast can peace ever be created without destroying ourselves and the earth. I guess that is one of the reasons I’m here.
This is your typical chaos, grab and go operation. Same as it ever was.
Worth remembering:
(1) In the recent election Maduro got 5.8 million votes and Guaido got 1.8 million. It was “free and fair”, and although the “opposition” urged a boycott, they had in any event, zero chance to win because the result indicates that they would have had a 4 million vote deficit to overcome. No way that was gonna happen.
And (2) the army remains loyal and the intelligence services enjoy the assistance of Cuban security advisers with eighty years of successful experience holding the US Deep State at bay.
So a long distance coup won’t work; scaring Maduro out of office won’t work; and internal subversion — the Cubans will prevent that — won’t work. What’s left? The Colombian military aided by US air power? What are the risks for the Colombians, and do they really want to go there? (And how does the Pentagon feel about that?) The economic oil squeeze? From the Reuters-linked article cited above — “already gearing up for a fight” — we find this in the very last paragraph:
Half a million barrels every day!!! “High margin products!!”
That’s a lot of revenue to sacrifice for the Neocon wet dreams of Bolton, Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams. I see a lot of resistance to that. Like Bolton’s dream of war on North Korea, a “bridge too far” I think, for Trump the Businessman.
” In the recent election Maduro got 5.8 million votes and Guaido got 1.8 million”
Maduro got 6.2 million votes and Guaido got 0 votes. Guaido wasn’t a candidate.
I stand corrected. I did a Google search for results of the election, and found those two numbers: 5.8 million and 1.8 million, at this website:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/venezuela-maduro-wins-presidential-vote-boycotted-opposition-180521024447255.html
Quoting from the website:
“According to the results announced by Tibisay Lucena, president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), President Maduro obtained 5.8 million votes while his main opponent, Henri Falcon, collected a total of 1.8 million votes.
Indeed, as you can see, Guaido was not mentioned. Rather, it was Henri Falcon. My bad,
Trying again, this time from Wikipedia, we get the following results:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Venezuelan_presidential_election
The losers and the usual assortment of US stooges — predictably — declared the election illegitimate, but look at the vote count. As I implied in my original comment, Maduro has the indisputable, overwhelming, support of the Venezuelan people.
Votes Percentage
The people of Venezuela : Maduro: 6,245,862 67.8%
US regime-change opposition: Henri Falcón: 1,927,387 20.9%
Independent: Javier Bertucci: 996,181 10.8%
Thanks for helping, because — even better — Guaido got zero votes.
How many votes did Nancy Pelosi get for president in 2016?
Zero.
And yet, if Congress simultaneously impeached and removed Trump and Pence, she would be the president.
You could almost say “it” would be the president since she’s actually more of a credit card than a person.
You could say the same about Pence, who seems to be more of a walking ‘Chick Tract’ than a person.
If Pelosi joined the Deep State in an “impeachment” coup, as Guaido is attempting, would her ascendance to the “Leadership of the Free World” still be Constitutionally legitimate? C’mon!
But it’s all nonsense. This Guaido circus will go nowhere. If he gets too pushy to ignore, he’ll simply be jailed for inciting insurrection, as so many of the opposition leadership before him have been. He’ll spend a few months or years in detention, and then be released to resume his then neutered and irrelevant political “career”.
Personally, I’m hoping this Venezuela regime-change debacle will subject Bolton, Pompeo, and Abrams to enough humiliation that Trump, having “drained” them, will fire them and they will exit stage right in howling disgrace.
Why has England froze Venezuela’s money and gold . At the USA direction .. I can see where these sanctions and money freezes could make Venezuela government look worse than they really are . Why don’t we try to help Venezuela instead . People are having enough trouble their already
They absolutely have to be subservient to our oilogarchs and be ready to be our cheap labor bitches.
It’s all a part of the capitalist plan to snare the entire planet into debt peonage to the ruling cabal of bankster thieves.
England, like the U.S., doesn’t like it when anyone repatriates national gold.
Hopefully among the options on the table are ‘do nothing’ and ‘constructive dialogue’.
What the neocons may be upset with is the Constituent National Assembly Maduro formed in 2017, which like Chavez’ 1999 Constituent National Assembly, was formed to write a new Constitution. The CNA by necessity also became the de facto ruling national assembly for the duration of its brief existence. The Venezuelan House sort-of became bicameral again, except with no separation of powers and absolute priority given to the CNA.
The existing National Assembly is still fixed to favour Venezuela’s oligarchy and their American cohorts. A new Constitution developed by the 2017 CNA may change that. Accusations that Maduro is performing a self-coup are true, but its a legal popular coup. Its beyond mere elections; voting in an full extra layer of legislative public government.
Its doubtful that Maduro can write a better Constitution on his own, but the Russian presence has the Neocons spooked.
Chavez used a Presidential decree and popular referendum to justify his 1999 CNA. Maduro emulated that badly by not backing his CNA with a won popular referendum. The new Venezuelan Constitution, whatever is done, needs close the back door on Constituent Assemblies by decree alone.