No plan for day two
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No plan for day two is the formulation John Kiriakou uses for what he calls one of the first things he learned at the CIA.

"The United States is really good at overthrowing governments. It's not hard to do. The real work is what you do after the government has been overthrown. And we don't have the foggiest idea how to bring stability to these countries whose governments we overthrow. Look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan, look at Libya, look at Syria, look at Sudan, Somalia, you can look all over the world."

Applied to Venezuela, the question he says nobody has answered is the second one: even granting that a capital can be taken, "what do you do 24 hours later? Let's say Maduro does run off to wherever he's going to run off to. Then what do you do? Again, this was a lesson that I learned at the CIA, there's never a plan for day two. The planning only is about day one."

The memory of the people it was done to

Kiriakou adds a second cost that outlasts the operation. The overthrow of the Árbenz government in Guatemala "may have happened 75 years ago, but in the minds of most Latin Americans, it happened yesterday. And so there's this real distrust of the United States when it comes to the issue of overthrowing governments and allowing chaos to ensue, or allowing military dictatorships to entrench themselves in power. Nothing good comes from this kind of US foreign policy."

Why it keeps happening

Asked how intelligent people repeat a failure they can all see, Kiriakou gave three reasons.

"Number one, they think they're smarter than you are, smarter than everybody else in the room. Number two, back in 2003 it would have worked if they were in charge: the people in 2003 didn't know what they were talking about, but today I'm smarter and I know more and I have more experience, so I'll get it right this time."

"And number three, at least in the Middle East, you've got this voice on your shoulder saying: attack Iran, attack Iraq, attack Iran, attack Iraq. And it gets hard to say no after a while, depending on who's the president."

He closes with his own department's verdict on the flowers prediction before the 2003 invasion, his boss's "no, they know nothing about history", and the update: "nothing's changed between 2003 and 2025."

See also

- The four requirements of a coup
- United Fruit and the Arbenz coup
- The Libyan Constitution Unveiling
- Hamid Karzai
