When President George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq in 2003, I was about to graduate college and was two weeks away from going on active duty in the Marines. I listened to Bush’s speech with a mentor of mine, a Marine captain who’d taken a sabbatical to earn his master’s in international affairs. We grew depressed as we listened to the president’s remarks; we thought we had missed the war.
As Bush went on about the stunning achievements of his “coalition of the willing” and the success of his shock and awe campaign, my friend couldn’t take it anymore. He switched off the radio. “Sucks to have missed this,” he said. “But these things never go as planned. Good chance there’ll be an insurgency.”
By all accounts, this weekend’s raid in Venezuela was an unqualified military success. In five hours, the U.S. military captured the dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife while sustaining zero U.S. casualties, thereby decapitating a regime that has preyed on its people for years and driven a once-prosperous nation to the brink of collapse. Those in uniform should be applauded for again proving the U.S. military is second to none in executing these types of complex operations.
