It’d make more sense to compare this to the US overthrowing Hussein. There was no attempt at preserving plausible deniability or relying on deniable assets like they did with Cuba, they just went in and secured the objective.

Though it still took them a few weeks to get Hussein. I don’t know if that speaks to how much more powerful US surveillance and intelligence has become in the last 20 years or more to how unprepared Venezuela was for invasion, though.

Really frightening. I hope Cuba is preparing itself for invasion, because they’ll certainly do it again.

For the comparison to Fidel, this wasn’t very subtle. If you read about the attempts on Fidel, a lot of them [not all] are filled with the usual CIA wackiness. I.e, explode him with a cigar or poison icecream or whatever. Even Bay of Pigs had plausible deniability and Kennedy scaled back air support. Given soviet backing, the US had to rube-goldburg machine their way into killing Castro. Castro was a long con you hear about in books, which are convuluted and confusing and barely legal. Maduro was a mugger cutting your purse, basically.

Also this was basically entirely focussed on Maduro, based on current information. The forces used to defend against an general occupation seem to be up and running [for now] and did scratch the task force [according to trump].

Lastly, Maduro has been playing up a lot of “man of the people” stuff, and probably rejected hiding in some cave in the middle of nowhere, or might have assumed the US would invade first and then attempt to capture him, like Saddam (that’s just speculation on my part though).

Overall, we’ll see. It’s been barely half a day so whatever happens next will help us formulate a conclusion

Its quite obvious that they just didn’t have the technical capacity to avoid it, and i don’t think they have ever had. The US has been able to topple Venezuela for years they just weren’t in a rush to do it nor they wanted to destroy their reputation yet, the US is now in a serious state of emergency economically and politically and thus accelerated these brutal takeovers without consideration for international reputation.

Same goes for Cuba, but the lack of economic resources there makes it a very low priority. Most of attempts against Fidel were made by ex-cuban extremists too

While it indeed happened easier then I would of expected, the reasons are not that difficult to surmise. One country is reliant on leftover scraps from the 1980s for it’s military hardware, the other has multi-billion dollar datacenters they can use to strategically dissect the country and figure out precisely what is the exact best things to do at the exact best time. The US historically never struggled with toppling state actors, it’s difficulties where with quelling decentralized resistances. What happens now is the big question.

Corruption. They bought enough people in key positions. Do we know how many officers of the presidential guard were killed or wounded by the team that kidnapped Maduro? Yesterday I only heard reports of the bombing in the news, but not a word about the fight inside the presidential residence (except of course Trump’s bullshits). Perhaps soon we’ll find out that it wasn’t a fight, at all.

EDIT: btw Trump also said that they knew about the safe room and the team brought equipment to open it. It’s hard to believe that CIA agents infiltrated the residence ala Splinter Cell to find out this details. I’m afraid that Maduro was simply betrayed by his people.

How did isisrael disable Iran’s air defenses and kill dozens of nuclear scientists?

Spies, Collaborators, Bribes, and a sneak attack.

They smuggled in and/or bought enough men to assault Maduro’s residence and kidnap him. They launched enough missiles and set up enough jammers to knock out the air defense installations so the helicopters could come in and pick him up.

I’m assuming this is asked in good faith out of curiosity, but I don’t like how it is phrased. It implies that it was easy to do for the US, which is not, as far as I’m aware, proven. It could have taken them months or years of probing, infiltration, and regional military preparation to get to the point where they could do this. I also don’t like how some people are replying as if it definitely was easy and they have the answer for why. The US power base is not god (in spite of it liking to act like it is) and given how much and often it has couped countries over decades, if it was easy for them to coup Venezuela, they would have done so long ago. This terrorist’s act of kidnapping the president looks more like desperation to me than a show of strength. Don’t give them credit for strength they are not proven to have.

i mostly assume that the surprise motherfucker! factor was key in the invasion,