One of the most flawlessly executed special forces operations of the last half-century took place in 1979 when Soviet commandos stormed Afghanistan’s heavily defended presidential palace, killing Hafizullah Amin and several of his top aides. This allowed Moscow to install a replacement government much more congenial to its interests, though the result was the long Afghanistan war against Muslim guerillas.
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, elderly and decrepit and not long for this world, must have felt tremendous pride at that successful action, as did his equally superannuated Politburo colleagues. I’m sure they all believed it demonstrated that the Soviet Union and its powerful military were still just as robust and vigorous as all their propagandistic Pravda editorials always proclaimed.
But despite that momentary military success, the Soviet economy and political system continued to decay. Just a dozen years later the USSR collapsed and disintegrated, with its Russian successor state soon entering one of the worst periods in its entire national history.
I think that lesson of the past should be kept in mind as the Trump Administration and its mindless sycophants currently crow over their successful seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The latter are now rather bizarrely being brought to trial in Manhattan federal district court, with one of the charges against that foreign head of government apparently being that he had been in possession of illegal firearms.
No Monty Python skit would have ever dared include such outlandish elements.
