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Press TV is now joined by author and commentator John Steppling, who’s with us from Inderoy, Norway. We also have Kevin Barrett, joining us from Saïdia, Morocco. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Let’s start off with Mr. Steppling: Please just give us your perspective on how events have transpired with regards to Venezuela.
John Steppling: The targeting of ships off the coast of Venezuela seems to have entered into a new phase with the seizure of this oil tanker. The U.S. can’t invade Venezuela. They’re not capable of an actual land invasion, some kind of amphibious invasion with boots on the ground. They can’t do it. The American public has no appetite for the deaths of American military personnel either. So they’re going to avoid that at all costs.
The original justification for blowing up these fishing boats in the Caribbean was that they were transporting fentanyl. The boats couldn’t even reach the United States. They don’t have the range for that. The cartel that they accused Maduro of being the head of doesn’t exist. It’s a mythical cartel.
They—the US government—just keep inventing new stories, just keep inventing new justifications. And they’re not (plausible). They don’t even try very hard.
Now they seize an oil tanker. It looks very good, but there’s some other tankers out there delivering oil. This is meaningless. It’s a little tiny drop in the bucket. It has some symbolic resonance, I guess. But the U.S. is not going to invade. They may bomb a few places, but they’re terrified that Venezuela will shoot back.
So the US is a country that’s like a rabid dog that has been cornered. And it’s very dangerous in one sense because it’s unpredictable. Trump is trying to find things to do that will distract from Ukraine, Gaza, and Jeffrey Epstein, not necessarily in that order. So, you know, this is piracy. Is it illegal? Of course it is. Blowing up the fishing boats was illegal, too. But the U.S. doesn’t care. They’re flailing about, and they’re like a cornered dog that is snarling and yapping, but ultimately isn’t going to do much damage, I don’t think.
Kevin Barrett, I’d like you to weigh in on the situation as well. Venezuelan officials have said that whatever the U.S. is doing, it’s just along the lines of justification, specifically alluding to the attacks on the fishing boats. Venezuelans, high ranking officials, say that it’s always been about Venezuela’s natural wealth, its oil, its energy and its resources. How would you explain what the U.S. is doing with regards to Venezuela, specifically this massive military buildup in the Caribbean?
Well, I recently wrote an article posted at the Unz Review, that’s UNZ.com, pointing out that we’re living through a kind of a deja vu flashback to George W. Bush’s buildup to war with Iraq. In both cases we have preposterously false justifications for attacks on oil-rich nations. In the case of Bush Jr., they made up stories of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction that clearly didn’t exist. Now Trump’s people are making up even more ridiculous stories about a different kind of chemical weapon, fentanyl. But it’s widely known and admitted by everyone, including the U.S. government, that virtually all fentanyl consumed in the United States is manufactured in Mexico. Mexico, of course, is directly south of the United States. Venezuela is down in South America and has nothing to do with fentanyl. The fishing boats that Trump has been blowing up and murdering people and Hegseth has been ordering double-tap attacks to kill survivors—these are extremely grotesque war crimes. These fishing boats have nothing to do with any fentanyl. So that whole excuse is preposterous, just like the Iraq war excuses were.
And Trump is beating his chest like a baboon, like Bush did in 2003, defaming the leader of the sovereign oil-rich nation that he wants to attack. Back then, Bush was calling Saddam Hussein an evil dictator. That’s the sort of rhetoric that we’re now hearing from Trump about Maduro.
But what is this really all about? Well, it is largely about the fact that it’s an oil-rich country, and the United States right now is smarting under the sting of being slapped in Ukraine, being unable to leverage any power with China, and being in a position to lose a war with China over Taiwan. So what else can they do? Well, they can go try to attack a smaller country in the American hemisphere.
But again, I agree with the other guest John Steppling. I don’t think that’s going to work. But I think the hidden factor here that isn’t being mentioned in the mainstream media is that it’s really not about oil, in the sense that the United States can buy Venezuelan oil. Maduro, as he recently said, will happily sell the United States Venezuelan oil at a perfectly reasonable price.
Why won’t the United States take yes for an offer? It’s the same situation as with Saddam Hussein in 2003. The reason is that the United States is owned by Jewish Zionist gangsters who completely dominate the media and the financial sector. And those Jewish Zionist gangsters are not even loyal to the United States of America or its empire. They are loyal to the genocidal entity squatting in Palestine.
And that’s why Saddam Hussein was taken out. Not because he had oil that he wouldn’t sell. He wanted to sell his oil to the United States. They took him out because he was building up a military that had as its ultimate intention the liberation of Palestine.
And in Venezuela, we have a government there that is very much allied with the Resistance Axis and has an independent foreign policy and opposes the genocide of Palestine. And the Jewish Zionist gangsters that have taken over the United States, murdered the Kennedys, blew up the World Trade Center on 9/11, have destroyed my country. So I don’t even want to live there anymore. Those horrific monsters are behind these crimes against Venezuela.
All right. And a quick question for Mr. Steppling, if you’d like to add anything to what Mr. Kevin Barrett just alluded to. And in addition to that, what is the endgame with regards to Venezuela? Because we’ve seen this type of animosity towards Caracas over various US administrations.
John Steppling: Well, yeah, I think, Kevin, you know, mentioning Israel was an important addition to this whole equation. You can never minimize the influence of the Zionist billionaires in the U.S. government, and their control of media in particular. And they’re in the middle of a massive re-legitimizing campaign—re-legitimize Israel, because the world hates them right now. The end game, I don’t know. I mean, it’s true that this echoes the invasion of Iraq. It echoes Bush Jr. But the U.S. is even less powerful now. Their military is less well-stocked with weapons. They are less well-trained. They’ve had a string of failures. They couldn’t even stop Yemen from shutting down the Red Sea. I mean, they haven’t had a win…taking over an unarmed oil tanker is not exactly Iwo Jima. It’s a little bit pathetic, in fact.
So I don’t know that Trump thinks in terms of end games. They don’t really have one. Everything starts to feel like they’re shooting themselves in the foot with every decision they make. And this is another example. None of this will end well for the U.S.
