Maduro's capture bucks US record of messy overthrows in Arab world

After weeks of pressure at sea and entreaties to talk, US President Donald Trump has announced the capture of Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro.

How this development plays out is up in the air. Venezuela's Defence Minister, Vladimir Padrino, is vowing that the Chavista regime will not buckle to US pressure.

What is possible is that in carrying out a swift mission the US has avoided a flaw that undermined previous attempts to achieve change by bringing down foreign leaders. In the Arab world, the US has been at this point before with military interventions against Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi in the first and second decades of this century.

Trump says Venezuela's president Maduro 'captured' in US operation

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Unlike the reported events in Venezuela's capital, Caracas, the US was at pains not to intervene directly to bring down Qaddafi in 2011. In Tripoli there were months of a phoney-war atmosphere as the fighter planes and missile carriers of the Nato operation carried out strikes.

The Libyan capital was, in fact, vulnerable to the type of operation that has been authorised by Mr Trump in the Venezuelan mega-city.

From a high floor in the tower of the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli I looked down on the empty car park where a lone gunner on an anti-aircraft three-wheeler fired blindly into the night sky in mid-March.

Within Tripoli it was common knowledge where the Brotherly Leader and his coterie of sons lived and operated with their entourage.

The rumoured tunnels that connected hotels near the foreign ministry to exit points that allowed a quick escape from the city were well known too.

The officials loyal to the Qaddafi regime, which had operated since 1969, worked hard to mobilise tribes and the city’s southern suburbs to provide and aura of support in the capital for weeks under the Nato bombardment.

Muammar Gaddafi at a military parade in 1999. Getty Images.

US president Barack Obama was “leading from behind”, allowing France and the UK to orchestrate a gradual takeover of the Libyan coast using rebel units co-ordinated with a network of Thuraya satellite phones. Operation Unified Protector, as the Nato planners called it, wanted the 40-plus years of Qaddafi rule to crack under Libyan pressure.

It took until mid-autumn for the fleeing leader to meet his end in a culvert between Misrata and Sirte.

Almost a decade before, the pressure on Saddam Hussein was waged directly by a US-led coalition that swept north across Iraq. The invasion of Baghdad was accompanied by apocalyptic scenes.

The decades of Saddam’s rule had seen the country atrophy from wealthy and dynamic to oppressed and fearful. The palaces on the Tigris were captured by advancing tanks. Famously, his statue on Firdos Square was pulled down by a military digger and a US marine wrapped the stars and stripes on its head on April 9.

Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops in Ad Dawr, Iraq, on December 13, 2003. AFP

The mid-March launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom failed to capture Saddam in Baghdad. His sons were killed in a gunfight in Mosul in July. Saddam had used the back roads of Baghdad and Tikrit to get to safety.

As US troops scoured the low-lying desert and reed-covered landscape of his home province, the Iraqi leader remained elusive until a tip-off led to a hole in the ground in Ad Dawr on December 13, 2003.

Saddam was later handed over to those who took power in Iraq following the regime change. It took three years of wrangling and judicial process before the US nemesis was hanged in a moment overseen by his Iraqi adversaries at the end of 2006.

For the US military the record of regime change is messy and drawn out, as Libya and Iraq demonstrate. The only parallel of a direct extraction was that of Central America’s Manuel Noriega.

The US was able to capitalise on the advantages of geography to ensure a rapid conclusion to that intervention. Washington launched the invasion of Panama, which was known as Operation Just Cause, in late 1989. Noriega took refuge in the Vatican's embassy but surrendered on January 3, 1990 following a siege by US forces, who used loud music to force an end to the situation.

It appears that President Maduro, who embodied the 1999 revolution of former leader Hugo Chavez, gave a crucial opening to the US by driving around Caracas on Friday to show his confidence. Hours later he was seized trying to access a presidential safe room, according to President Trump.

It was an opportunity too good to miss and quite a few other leaders hostile to the US will be watching and learning.