Trump ‘reaping bitter fruit’ of thinking Iran intervention as easy as Venezuela, says former diplomat | Venezuela

Donald Trump is “reaping the bitter fruit” of the erroneous notion that the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro represents a plot to overthrow the Iranian regime, according to one of the US State Department’s most respected former Latin America experts.

Marine helicopter pilot John Feeley, who later served as the U.S. ambassador to Panama, believed Trump was “thrilled with victory from Venezuela” when he made the ill-fated decision to attack Iran in February, leaving a trail of destruction in the Middle East and dealing a major blow to the global economy.

Maduro was captured during a special forces mission on January 3; The remnants of his authoritarian regime quickly capitulated to US demands under the leadership of his successor, Delcy Rodríguez. More than 100 Cuban and Venezuelan soldiers lost their lives during Trump’s Operation Absolute Resolve, but not a single member of the US military was killed.

“This was one of the most striking, effective and powerful demonstrations of American military power and proficiency in American history,” Trump boasted last month, saying their strikes were proof that the United States had “the strongest and most intimidating military on the planet.”

Feeley acknowledged that Maduro’s capture shows the Trump administration is “willing to use force to get rid of someone they don’t like.””. But he and other former senior US diplomats believed it also led the US president to mistakenly believe that overthrowing Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his regime would be as easy as overthrowing the South American autocrat.

“We are literally reaping the bitter fruit of a huge decision right now.” [part] “He chose to go to Iran based on the incredible luck he had in Venezuela,” said Feeley, emphasizing that his comments were not a criticism of the elite forces that kidnapped Maduro.

“As someone who flies in these units… I can’t tell you how many things can go terribly wrong,” he said of the night raid involving Delta Force commandos and members of an elite aviation unit known as the Night Stalkers.

Who is Feeley? left the foreign service He said the Venezuela attack during Trump’s first term led Trump to expect a similar “two-week, three-lane spectacular war” in Iran. “I think it’s very true that the success of the Venezuela thing led him to give the green light and start the Iran thing,” he said, expressing fears that a similar miscalculation could soon be made in Cuba, which Trump had recently vowed to “get.”

“I think these guys are going to make a very stupid and naive mistake in thinking that Cuba will be just like Venezuela, just like they misunderstood that Iran would be just like Venezuela,” he said.

“These are 70-year-old regimes, in the case of Iran, 50-year regimes. They are decentralized, the ranks are trained, they are brainwashed… This is a very different scenario from Venezuela, the criminal mafia that has really consolidated its position in the last decade. But I think this administration is short-sighted enough… it still foolishly believes, ‘We’re going to get in there’.”

Venezuela expert and former Brazilian ambassador Thomas Shannon, who was responsible for Latin American policy under George W Bush, also believed that Trump’s Venezuela intervention caused him to make a serious miscalculation in the Middle East.

“He actually thought Iran would do the same thing. So, [Trump] They knew they could not go in and arrest the religious leader. “But he thought they could go in and kill him and kill many other leaders, both civilian and military, and that this demonstration would have the same effect as the raid on Caracas,” said Shannon, who believed Trump was hoping to replace Iran’s ayatollah with a subservient, Rodríguez-style figure. No such leader emerged.

Shannon said: “In many ways, Venezuela is setting the wrong example. But that’s what the President had in mind when he decided to join the Israelis in the February 28 attack. The problem is that the circumstances are quite different and the Iranians are different. And they have the resilience and the kind of internal capacity and structure to withstand those kinds of attacks without having to surrender or pretend to surrender.”

Feeley bowed to Trump’s attack in January, seeing an irony in the fact that the US president’s longtime enemies in Caracas had unwittingly persuaded the US to make such a damaging misjudgment 7,000 miles away in Tehran.

“Frankly, hard power is hard power, and there is nothing they can do to stop Trump from doing what he did. [in Venezuela]” said Feeley. “But their ultimate revenge was to kind of go all out and make it look easy – and so [Trump] I thought: ‘Oh, I’ll try this in an ancient Persian empire, a thousand-year-old civilization. Threaten to blow up the entire civilization.’ And we are where we are.”