{"id":307408,"date":"2025-11-17T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307408"},"modified":"2025-11-12T07:11:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T07:11:14","slug":"regime-change-in-venezuela-is-euphemism-for-u-s-inflicted-carnage-and-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/regime-change-in-venezuela-is-euphemism-for-u-s-inflicted-carnage-and-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"“Regime Change\u201d in Venezuela Is Euphemism for U.S.-inflicted Carnage and Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A United Socialist Party rally in Caracas, 3 Aug 2024. Photo: Morning Star<\/p><\/div>\n

11 Nov 2025 – <\/em>For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that \u201cregime change\u201d brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth\u2014it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.<\/p>\n

As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter<\/a> patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) \u2014 the \u201cNightstalkers\u201d \u2014 the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared<\/a> Interior Ministry death squad.<\/p>\n

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged<\/a> about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a \u201cbattalion-sized joint operation\u201d in southern Baghdad and boasted, \u201cAs we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained<\/a> Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they\u2019d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found<\/a> in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away \u2014 but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers\u2019 MH-47 Chinook<\/a> helicopters.<\/p>\n

This was how the Bush\u2013Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal<\/a> invasion: catastrophic assaults<\/a> on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing<\/a> of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported<\/a> over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies<\/a> estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.<\/p>\n

Iraq has never fully recovered\u2014and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole<\/a> at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected<\/a> U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq\u2019s largest trading partners<\/a> are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey\u2014not the United States.<\/p>\n

The neocon dream of \u201cregime change\u201d has a long, bloody history<\/a>, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But \u201cregime change\u201d is a euphemism: the word \u201cchange\u201d implies improvement. A more honest term would be \u201cgovernment removal\u201d\u2014or simply the destruction of a country or society.<\/p>\n

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking\u2014while making life worse for ordinary people.<\/p>\n

These so-called \u201cmilitary solutions\u201d rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.<\/p>\n

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal<\/a> US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized<\/a> by many nations and remains one of the poorest<\/a> countries in Europe. The main U.S. ally in the war, Hashim Tha\u00e7i, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific<\/a> crimes committed under cover of NATO\u2019s bombing.<\/p>\n

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated<\/a> by the Taliban\u2014the very force it had invaded the country to remove.<\/p>\n

In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled<\/a> the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

In 2006, the U.S. militarily supported<\/a> an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government\u2014an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. U.S. AFRICOM has conducted<\/a> 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.<\/p>\n

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the U.S. supported an election to replace<\/a> him. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration\u2014until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya\u2019s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive<\/a> government in 2021.<\/p>\n

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the U.S. and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule<\/a>, the return<\/a> of slave markets, the destabilizing<\/a> of neighboring countries and a 45% reduction<\/a> in oil exports.<\/p>\n

Also in 2011, the U.S. and its allies escalated<\/a> a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the U.S.-led massacres that destroyed Mosul<\/a> in Iraq and Raqqa<\/a> in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel<\/a>, Turkey<\/a>, and the U.S.<\/a> still militarily occupy other parts of the country.<\/p>\n

The U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine\u2019s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate<\/a> government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO<\/a> and Russia.<\/p>\n

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power<\/a> in Yemen after the resignation of a U.S.-backed transitional government, the U.S. joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed<\/a> hundreds of thousands of Yemenis\u2014yet did not defeat the Houthis.<\/p>\n

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup<\/a>; crippling unilateral economic sanctions<\/a>; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 \u201cBay of Piglets\u201d mercenary fiasco<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But even if \u201cregime change\u201d in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve \u201cat the emperor\u2019s pleasure\u201d as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.<\/p>\n

In Venezuela today, Trump\u2019s opening shots\u2014attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean\u2014have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by U.S. senators<\/a> who routinely support America\u2019s illegal wars.<\/p>\n

Yet Trump still claims<\/a> to be \u201cending the era of endless wars.\u201d His most loyal supporters insist he means it\u2014and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the \u201cdeep state.\u201d This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons<\/a> or warhawks, but he has still not ended America\u2019s wars.<\/p>\n

Alongside Trump\u2019s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of\u00a0 Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest\u2014draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice<\/a> for Latin America, given Rubio\u2019s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.<\/p>\n

Brazilian President Lula made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying<\/a>: \u201cThere will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.\u201d At Lula\u2019s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over U.S. investments in Brazil\u2019s rare earth metals industry, the world\u2019s second largest after China\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as Secretary of State it renders him incapable of responsibly managing U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio<\/a> corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio\u2019s threats<\/a> of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker<\/a>; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.<\/p>\n

If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it\u2019s that \u201cregime change\u201d doesn\u2019t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Medea Benjamin is cofounder of <\/em>CODEPINK for Peace<\/em><\/a>, and author of several books, including <\/em>Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of<\/em> Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of<\/em> War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict<\/a>, available from OR Books in November 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Nov 2025 – The fate that awaits the people of Venezuela if Trump should launch an invasion or a coup, as his predecessors did to Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, Honduras, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen: Destruction, destabilization and years of corruption and chaos – in every case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":307409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[867,1441,417,393,541,559,3324,1190,2137,249,557],"class_list":["post-307408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","tag-anglo-america","tag-big-oil","tag-bullying","tag-coup","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-maduro","tag-north-america","tag-regime-change","tag-south-america","tag-trump","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307408"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307415,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307408\/revisions\/307415"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}