Phil Stewart

Well, I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Well, he had been a very controversial leader for some time.

I was on a trip to South America with the last chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not the one that's there now.

And during that trip, the head of Southern Command had actually called him a dictator back then in Chile, which had a very left-leaning government, and he was seen as a dictator there too.

And so Maduro had been quite controversial there.

even among the left in Latin America because of the fact that his last election victory was widely condemned by international organizations as being fraudulent.

And so although there's a lot of questions about the legality of the operation, there aren't so many questions really about how the international community viewed Maduro.

Much more recently, yeah.

They said that the decision had been made just in recent days and that, you know, I think the president himself said that they were going to go in four days before they did, but the circumstances didn't work out and they rescheduled.

Right.

And so and so it was it was one of those situations where the president, as is traditional, retains the ability to kind of decide, you know, at the very last moment whether to really go forward or not, because you want to have all the information available to you.

You don't want to pre decide a military operation and then maybe some other opportunity to resolve it appears.

So he did.

But the but the but the military option, from what we understand, was was given enough.

that you saw Delta Force soldiers training on a mock version of this compound and really- In Kentucky, where we are actually.

Yeah, and so there they are training hard on an operation that's extraordinarily dangerous.

I mean, the ability of anyone to go into a well-guarded compound like that and come out with no casualties, no dead anyway, is really just incredible.

Well, I mean, it was a very...

it was a massive operation.