The Washington coup in Venezuela

Jeremy Schahill comments on Mike Pence's regime change operation in Venezuela in this video, The Yankee Plot to Overthrow Nicolás Maduro and Steal Venezuela’s Oil 02/02/2019:

As you can tell from the title, Schaill is definitely taking an editorial position here. But what he describes is accurate, based on the information currently publicly available.

There will be blowback from this operation. Even if Pence and John Bolton and Elliot Abrams were to decide today that they're ready to fold and just give up this coup attempt, there will still be ugly blowback for the US. If they push it to military intervention, as that particular Triad of Warmongers will if they aren't restrained from doing so, it will become a major diaster.

Speaking of blowback and disasters, Tom Engelhardt thinks back on a previous regime change adventure in “The Bleeding Wound”: Afghanistan and the Implosion of America TomDispatch 01/24/2019. Blowback happens.

And, in the [deep sigh] category, the New York Times may have learned nothing from its various fiascos in covering US foreign policy, particularly their disgraceful role in pimping the Iraq War based on Dick Cheney's and Don Rumsfeld manufacture WMD hype.

In a glowing report on nominal coup leader Juan Guaidó (Guaidó Steers Venezuela to a Perilous Crossroads 02/03/2019), Ernesto Londoño writes, "His success would be all the more remarkable considering the scrappy operation/ Mr. Guaidó and his allies have mounted, seemingly overnight, to/take down a heavily /armed authoritarian government whose leaders stand accused of turning the state into a vast criminal enterprise."

That is the tenth paragraph of text in the piece. And to that point the reader would never know that the coup attempt is being openly directed from Washington by the Trump-Pence Administration.

If you read past this point, you see:

As he tries to rally domestic and international backing, Mr. Guaidó has been crisscrossing Caracas with minimal security, at times weaving through traffic on the back of a motorcycle. He fields the calls from world leaders, as well as diplomats and Venezuelan politicians, on a cellphone that gets a torrent of text messages, and his phone’s battery seems always on the verge of dying. [my emphasis]

Someone who is awake while reading might ask at this point, what kind of dictatorship is Nicolás Maduro running and what kind of coup leader is Guaidó if this is what he's doing on a daily basis?

There could be plausbile answers to this. But the Times doesn't seem to notice that it raises the obvious questions.

Further down, we see what is the first public admission I've noticed from the coup leadership that things didn't go as planned in the last two weeks:

Opposition leaders had hoped that when Mr. Guaidó proclaimed himself the country’s legitimate leader at a huge street rally, the chiefs of the armed forces would turn on Mr. Maduro in short order. While there have been a handful of high-profile defections, the top military brass has publicly rallied behind Mr. Maduro, which may portend a protracted standoff.

“We’re seeing progress, but it’s not happening as quickly as we’d like,” Mr. Guaidó said, adding that fear remains a strong impediment, particularly among low-level troops who support what the opposition is doing.

Elliot Abrams is probably threatening to send Guaidó to Guantánamo from letting this slip out.