On Sunday, President Donald Trump delivered a speech on board the USS George H. W. Bush to mark the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the US Navy. A lot of it was his usual incoherent mixture of hawkish posturing and attempts to portray himself as a peace president. Out of one side of his mouth, he bragged about having supposedly ended seven wars. (He didn’t list the seven.) Out of the other side, he bragged about his administration’s mounting military aggression against Venezuela.
Trump said that his action in blowing up Venezuelan boats (which he claims without evidence were carrying drugs destined to be sold in the United States) was “pretty tough” but ultimately an act of “kindness” since it saves the lives of vast numbers of Americans who would otherwise die of overdoses. There’s no evidence that fentanyl bought by Americans comes from Venezuela, but factual inaccuracy has never been much of a hindrance to American presidents looking to launch military interventions in the developing world.
If Trump ever did decide to escalate from blowing up the occasional fishing boat to a full-scale assault on Venezuela, what would that look like? And how might other new wars launched by Trump elsewhere in the world be fought?
A hint came when the president indulged in a little historical revisionism about America’s wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. He said:
Problem with Vietnam, we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would have won easy. We would have won Afghanistan easy, would have won every war easy. But we got politically correct. “Ah, let’s take it easy.” We’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand. We win. Now, we win. We don’t want to be politically correct anymore.
Got that? Trump’s implying that the problem with the war in Afghanistan was that US tactics were too restrained in the interests of optics.
Over the course of the longest war in American history, the people of…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
