Secretary Of State Rubio: “I Watch These Experts And It’s Clown Hour”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed concerns about military action in Venezuela turning out the way U.S. actions did in Iraq, Syria, or Libya, during an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
KRISTEN WELKER: Let’s talk big picture here. U.S. regime change, historically speaking, has not gone very well for the United States, in Iraq, in Libya, to name a few examples. Can you assure Americans, the people of the United States, that this time will be different? SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: Well, here’s what’s happened. We’ve got this phobia built up in this sort of thing. Number one, most of the experts that people have, I’ll tell you. I watch these experts and it’s clown hour, okay? These are people that have focused their entire career on the Middle East or some other part of the world because that’s where the action was. Hey, very few of them know anything about Venezuela or the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela looks nothing like Libya. It looks nothing like Iraq. It looks nothing like Afghanistan. It looks nothing like the Middle East other than the Iranian agents that are running through there plotting against America, okay? These are Western countries with long traditions, on a people to people and cultural level, and ties to the United States. So there’s nothing like that. So I think people need to stop ascribing apples and oranges here. The apples of the Middle East, or the oranges of the Western Hemisphere. Number two. This is about the national interest of the United States. And what I’m confident of is we are in a safer and better place because we’re taking it seriously. The alternative would have been to leave Maduro there as an indicted drug trafficker, illegitimate president, running the country, open invitation for all of our adversaries to do whatever they want against the United States from Venezuela. That was not going to continue. What the alternative would have been to allow a drug trafficker to continue to use national territory and elements of nation-state power to further drug trafficking organizations. Read the indictment. This guy used the levers of their security apparatus not to arrest drug traffickers, but to cooperate and facilitate the trafficking of drugs for the purpose of getting them in to the United States. That’s going to stop.
