Clarifications on the military intervention in Venezuela and international law

Following the voluminous correspondence we received after Thierry Meyssan’s last column, we asked him to respond to his readers. He explains here that Operation Absolute Resolve does not violate any commitments made by the United States and is therefore not contrary to international law. He expresses surprise that his readers are offended by this intervention when they have accepted, often without protest, many other interventions that did violate our own commitments. This clarification provides an opportunity to reflect on the difference between the rules of the Cold War—which we still follow—and international law—which has become the standard in the multipolar world.

The article I published last week about Operation Absolute Resolve  [ 1 ] generated a flood of protest letters. I’ve only been able to respond to a small portion of them. I’m well aware that I may have expressed myself poorly, as some of you interpreted things I never wrote or said. I would therefore like to offer some clarification.

Firstly, the subject of my article was not the crisis in Venezuela, but the fact that the US intervention respects international law. I insist on this point.

International law is not a code, it is simply a commitment to respect one’s own word and not to behave like a barbarian.

From Washington’s perspective, Nicolás Maduro is a drug trafficker. The fact that this assertion is absurd is irrelevant. It is up to the US justice system to prove it. For my part, I stated that he authorized traffickers to cross his country’s territory to transport their cocaine to the United States. I never accused him personally of drug trafficking, neither cocaine nor fentanyl (a specialty of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel). I based my claims not on DEA investigations, nor on Israeli propaganda, but on the confidences of Lebanese drug lords. I also specified that these Venezuelan Shiite traffickers were not members of Hezbollah, but paid their zakat to Hezbollah.

Moreover, the United States acted in Venezuela as it had in Panama in 1989. There too, they accused President Manuel Noriega of being a drug trafficker and kidnapped him (Operation Just Cause ), resulting in several thousand deaths. It was never proven that he had trafficked drugs, but that he had paid Nicaraguan Contras with money from the Medellín Cartel. Now, we know that the Iran-Contra affair was conceived by Klaus Altman (alias Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”) before he was kidnapped by Régis Debray to be tried in France, and that this Nazi is the true organizer of the Medellín Cartel  [ 2 ] .

From a US perspective, Nicolás Maduro is not the president of Venezuela. I haven’t discussed this assertion, but refer you in a footnote to my August 2024 column on this subject  [ 3 ] . There, I explain that the Western version of the 2024 election is completely flawed. Even though less than 60% of voters participated, there is no doubt that Nicolás Maduro was elected. But, again, that’s not the point. A quarter of the UN member states—including the United States—do not recognize him as such. Therefore, Washington cannot be accused of violating the immunity of a head of state, as it committed to doing when signing the Vienna Convention.

Moreover, we French are particularly ill-placed to criticize the United States for kidnapping the president of Venezuela: it was we who, along with Dominique de Villepin, Régis Debray, and US special forces, kidnapped Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of Haiti  [ 4 ] . Technically, the United States had, there too, questioned the validity of President Aristide’s election by invoking a provision of the Haitian constitution. They kidnapped him and then handed him over to French special forces, who held him captive in the Central African Republic. At the time, very few people protested. The fact that we know Venezuela better than Haiti should not lead us to treat them differently.

Please note that I don’t believe removing Noriega, Aristide, and Maduro are good things, any more than installing Ayatollah Khomeini or Mikheil Saakashvili in power. I’m simply saying that it doesn’t violate international law, even if it shocks us and the United Nations.

While all UN member states have pledged to refrain “in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations” (Article 2 of the UN Charter), they all recognize a “right of pursuit” if they are attacked by a non-state organization and the host country fails to extradite it.

Thus, France conducted military operations in Syria in 2015 without any authorization, ostensibly to fight ISIS, which had committed the Bataclan attacks (Operation Chammal )  [ 5 ] . More recently, in 2022, we continued Operation Barkhane in Mali, even when the Malian government forbade us from doing so. The government was convinced that our intelligence services were supporting the jihadists our army was fighting. This is the reason for the expulsion of the French army from the Sahel  [ 6 ]

These clarifications are not intended to say that I approve of what the United States is doing, but only to emphasize that they have not violated their commitments and, therefore, have not violated international law.

Understand this clearly: international law was only established, jointly by Russia and France, at the end of the 19th century and has not been applied since the Cold War. It cannot resolve crises like the one in Venezuela. But it is this law that will be the reference point in the multipolar world that Russia, China, and the United States are currently building. It is therefore essential to understand its underlying logic.

Let’s not react by lamenting the Cold War order and the post-Soviet world we once knew. The G7 rules protected us, and we abused them. Many countries around the world paid the price. Not us. We are now entering a world governed by international law, in which the three superpowers can use force in all cases not covered by that law. And there are many.

This system, based on respecting one’s signature, only works if no one lies. However, in 2002, the Bush-Cheney administration established a special unit, composed exclusively of Straussians  [ 7 ] around Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith (including the inevitable Elliott Abrams), to fabricate lies: the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans  [ 8 ] . This agency concocted the fable that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was going to use them against the United States. It succeeded in convincing the American public that they were in danger. Furthermore, the United Kingdom, being the undisputed champion of manipulating news agencies  [ 9 ] , amplified the Straussians’ fabrications. These were further fueled by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who also published this nonsense. This is why President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, insist so much on freedom of expression, the only weapon in a democracy against lies. Note that the same group, this time centered around former George Bush ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, fabricated the narrative that there are no Nazis in Ukraine. The Straussians are thus preparing for war against Russia, just as they prepared for war against Iraq.

Returning to Absolute Resolve , this operation can be interpreted in light of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine  [ 10 ] , as well as in light of the US-Iran crisis. I didn’t address the first perspective in my article last week, but I did publish Alfredo Jalife-Rahme’s column on the same subject.  [ 11 ] Had I done so, I would have said—like him—that the United States now controls the main oil resources of the entire American continent, from Alaska to Patagonia, controlling 40%, not of global reserves, but of global production. I did, however, indicate that Washington didn’t want to steal Venezuelan oil, but rather to ensure that it wasn’t sold to certain states. Manlio Dinucci, for his part, specified that Washington initially intended for it to be sold in dollars and no longer in yuan or other currencies  [ 12 ] . I have always insisted that the United States economy is ailing; that it is accumulating a considerable debt, impossible to repay. President Trump, like President Gorbachev, is first and foremost obligated to address this challenge before any other objective.

Finally, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez declared the day after the US intervention: “Governments around the world are simply shocked that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the victim and target of an attack of this nature, which undoubtedly has a Zionist tinge.” It is worth remembering that Israel intervened in the Brazilian parliament to bring down President Dilma Rousseff in 2013, and also supported the coup in Honduras and the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya.

From a geopolitical point of view, if the United States does not intervene militarily in Iran, Venezuela’s ally and one of the causes of the abduction of President Maduro, we will have to conclude that the United States does not give itself the right to intervene outside its area of ​​influence defined in Anchorage on August 15, 2025. Andrei Martyanov’s map would therefore be correct  [ 13 ] .

https://www.voltairenet.org/article223486.html

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