A lively start to the weekend in Caracas: the US military flew in, seized the President and his wife, and for good measure (according to local rumour) bombed the mausoleum housing the remains of Hugo Chavez. Then they flew out, and, per Marco Rubio, "anticipate no further action against Venezuela".
America has done nothing like this since it captured a previous Latin-American strongman, Noriega, back in the Eighties. And that required ground troops and blasting a fortnight's worth of caterwauling rock'n'rollers into the president's refuge at the Vatican embassy. If the facts at dawn hold for the rest of the day, this has been a remarkable operation of brilliant precision - planned (according to a Steyn Club commenter's son who was part of the force) a fortnight ago and awaiting only favourable weather conditions.
Imagine if the first night of the so-called War on Terror had gone like this. To be sure, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden was a challenge of a different order. But it is worth recalling that, on that opening night of a wasted two decades in the Hindu Kush, a US drone had the fleeing Mullah Omar in its sights and could have blown him to his virgins. Yours truly just shy of a quarter of a sod-bollocking century ago:
Lacking the authority to 'push the button', the agency relayed the news back to central command in Florida, where General Tommy R Franks, the head man, replied, 'My JAG doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire.' A JAG is a Judge Advocate-General — i.e., a military lawyer — and the only reason I know that is because there's a show on CBS called JAG. It says something about our times that the only military adventure series on American network TV is about an army lawyer. So, rather than offing the mad mullah and worrying about ass-covering later, the ass-covering took precedence and the mullah got away.
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