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It's not a war if the other country can't fight back.
It is very likely, but no confirmed, that Maduro's capture was facilitated by people in his own government. Hence why it was so pathetically easy, and and used like 1/100 of the assets that the USA has built up in the area.
He ordered a strike, just like very other president before him has. They've all done stuff like this. You're lack of perspective and understanding about what he has done here is really telling. There was nothing extraordinary about this. Anyone watching the news has seen it coming for months, what is mostly shocking is the fact it wasn't a broader strike.
Are you saying that I should change my perspective from "Trump has committed war crimes" to "every other US President in modern history has committed war crimes"?
Because yes, of course the US have done shitty things to many other countries for sheer economical interest several times in history. But so far, as a European, I and many others were looking at these things with a LOT of goodwill (the allied WW2 saviors who freed us from Nazis... the land of the Free... Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11...). We were assuming all these unilateral intervention were for some type of greater good, and that those US soldiers were the good guys. Maybe we were naive. I was, for sure (or I wasn't born yet) when many of those past events happened.
It also "helped" that we were mostly being lied to at the time of the events and most of us only got the reality check many years later, under a new and generally apologetic US administration. It's not like when Cheney died I heard a lot of people crying on either side of the Atlantic, but in the moment we were (or at least I was) completely sold on Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Funnily enough, what's new with Trump is that his might actually be the most transparent administration in US history. It's hard now to be naive, complacent or even hypocritical when you have a President who's saying all the silent parts out loud ("yeah, our US companies want that oil, so we're going to run that country for a while"), while thumping his chest in the ring, pointing aggressively to the audience and shouting "you're next! Come fight me!" to friends and foes alike.
Nobody is ever the 'good guys'. Everyone is struggling for power and control over everyone else. The Nazis thought they were the good guys too (and still do).
Trump is saying the quiet part out loud, yes. And it is very very upsetting to people.
Personally I don't find any of what Trump does outrageous... but I have paid attention for 20+ years. Most people are only outraged at Trump because he makes the ugliness of our society visible, instead of kept in the closet out of sight.
But I don't believe any of us will ever stop being ugly. It's what we are as human beings. We just very much like to pretend we aren't, especially when we are engaging in acts of violence and hostility. There is nothing 'crazy' about Trump, it's just that he isn't as PC as every president before him, and his fans LOVE it, and his haters HATE it.
Meanwhile when Obama was 'politely' murdering people via drone strikes he was hated by the right for not 'putting boots on the ground' (pussies use drones!) and congratulated by the left for being so 'civilized'.
Might be, but the fact that they tried to look like the good guys (or at least to delay the revelation that they weren't until they were out of office) meant they had to at least give a shit what their people and voters thought.
The fact that Trump doesn't look like he even cares any longer what the shrinking number of his voters think does not look like a great sign either. And I'm not knowledgeable enough about US history to tell if that has a precedent or not, but I know we had quite a few in Europe.