The signs…of war

The question whether America is gonna launch an attack on Venezuela seems to’ve moved from the hypothetical realm to the here in the flesh!! And it’s now looking like it’s not a question of “if” no mo – but “when”!! What makes your Eyewitness say this, you ask, Dear Reader?? Well, he figures the dots are all out there and all we gotta do is connect them!! So what’s the first dot?? This was when the Yanks stopped kvetching about Mad Maduro rigging elections and began identifying him as head of a narco-smuggling cartel called the Cartel de los Soles!!
What this signalled was the Yanks had given up on the Venezuelan Opposition – first led by Guaidó and then by Machado – as being capable of rallying the necessary internal support to force the dictator to step down! The second dot was when they elaborated that as a mega drug -smuggling Boss to the US, he was killing thousands and thousands of “Americans” who overdosed!! This provided a justification for taking him out – by war if necessary!! There’s this justification they’d tried to introduce into international law that you could invade a country that was “unwilling or unable” to take out a private group harming your country!!
The doubling of the bounty on Mad Maduro’s head – for providing info that would lead to his capture – dead or alive!! – meant they were putting their money where their mouth was!! But a much bigger dot was when they officially labelled Mad Maduro’s Cartel as a “terrorist organisation”!! Now they didn’t even need the “unwilling or unable” doctrine – terrorist organisations are fair game for the affected country!! Remember Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda holed up in Pakistan??
And then came the biggest dot of them all – massing a veritable armada in the Caribbean Sea off Venezuela – on the scale that Spain had launched against Elizabeth’s England back in the day!! Imagine deploying almost a quarter of the entire American fleet – with destroyers, amphibious ships, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the most advanced F35 fighter jets and 15,000 marine troops!! They were not preparing for a picnic on Venezuelan beaches!!
Fast forward to the present, the Yanks made the entire enterprise against Venezuela real by naming it — “Operation Southern Spear”!! That the spear had already been hurled at Mad Maduro was signalled by US Marines conducting joint manoeuvrers with Trinidadian troops – less than ten miles from Venezuela!! And last weekend came the warning that no aircraft was to fly over Venezuelan airspace – even as the US Navy conducted a “Passing Exercise” with Guyanese naval vessels. This PASSEX exercise is meant to coordinate communications between the US Armada and our Navy!!
War Break!!

…of justice
It’s said that “justice is not a cloistered virtue”. It was uttered originally by no other than the most eminent Judge of the English Privy Council – Lord Aitkin. Interestingly, it justified some rather strong words of criticism about the alleged inequality of sentences passed in Trinidadian Courts for certain criminal offences. What the good Lord was saying is that there’s nothing inherently inappropriate for judicial decisions to be criticised by ordinary folks! The law, its officers and other dispensers of Justice are, after all, part and parcel of the same society as those who may express opinion on their judgements!!
And we arrive at the criticism levelled against Prezzie for commenting on the decision by one member of the High Court – that the GRA cannot revisit taxes on a car if they discover the original valuation submitted was false!! What made Prezzie’s comments more justifiable is he didn’t even pretend to interpret the law – but merely used a judgement by the High Chancellor that contradicted the High Court Judge!!

…of retreat
The old joke about the United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COPs) is that each one is a ‘cop-out’. So what did they cop out on in Brazil’s COP30?? Everything necessary to keep climate warming below the 1.5 degree rise!!