No. of Recommendations: 13
He sounds eager for a Round 2.
Does he make policy in Venezuela? Run the internal security forces or set foreign policy? Direct their domestic forces to assert a tight stranglehold over the populace, knowing that if the existing regime were ever to lose power that they'd all be up against a wall (and thus have very strong incentives not to do most of what Washington might want)?
No. He's a security guard. Of course the cannon fodder doesn't want a Round 2 - because they're the cannon fodder. The generals who decide what happens in Venezuela don't care what the cannon fodder wants. They care what they want. And they want to run their country the way they want to, and not follow the U.S.
Today we blew up the people who were going to pick Khamanei's successor. The Mullahocracy is running out of people to sit in chairs. If the Iranian people want to go for it, now is the time. It's totally up to them.
It's not up to them. It's up to the people with guns. If it's not a mullah, it will be a general. The "Iranian people" have no vehicle by which to assert what they want, no mechanism to translate the popular will into a change of who actually runs the country.
Who knew you were a Second Amendment supporter? :)
The Second Amendment doesn't really come into it. If the U.S. military decided to stage a coup and dislodge the civilian leadership and convert the U.S. into a military dictatorship, "the people" also wouldn't be able to stop it. I'm using the term "guns," but it's the entire package that makes a military force a vastly more effective fighting element than a bunch of undifferentiated civilians: better guns (of course), but also heavy weaponry, tanks and combat vehicles, air power, communications systems, training and a formal command command structure, access to ammunition and supply lines, advanced technology systems, and a host of other advantages that make it all-but-impossible for any civilian group to actually stand down an oppressive military regime to choose the next leaders.
There is a path to do that, but the term is "civil war" - you could see the populace actually organize, be supplied with better weaponry from abroad, and form a rebellion against the leadership. But that is a little different than "the Iranian people wanting to go for it" in the present time - that's going to be years of fighting with the nation torn apart by civil war. Libya, not the American Revolution (though to be fair, the American Revolution was also eight years of war).
