Andrew Sage

Then you try to flip them up for immunity or whoever your real targets are.

Maybe your target is Maduro or someone else in the regime.

But you can't do that when you kill everyone on the boat, right?

And I think the fact that in, I think, the latest boat strike, they didn't manage to kill everyone.

And a couple of them got away.

And then the U.S., rather than charge them with a crime, they just turned them back around.

And you would think that if the U.S.

is so certain that the people on those boats are...

drug trafficking terrorists that they want to kill them, then you'd think they would have enough evidence to charge them, to prosecute them, but apparently not.

So this is all to say the idea that this is a counter-narcotics operation doesn't hold up.

Clearly, it is meant to be more of a regime change operation.

But again, I don't see how the one leads to the other.

I believe that Trump thinks that if he just

Sabre rattles a little bit and possibly tries some decapitation strikes the way that the U.S.

did on Soleimani in Iran, that somehow the regime is going to collapse.

And that does not make any sense.

Maduro has surrounded himself with security, a lot of it including Cuban advisers.

He keeps his whereabouts very secret.

Even if somehow they were to drone strike him, it's not as if the regime as a whole would fall because it is an extremely militarized regime that is upheld by the armed forces who are not going to break with him because they have a hand in every lucrative business, both legal and illegal in Venezuela.

They're not going to be paid off or not be swayed by a bounty regime.