alt Hacker News> The people in Venezuela want democracy. It's a fundamentally different situation.
"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" - Dick Cheney (but I'm sure it'll work out this time)
There is a whole lot of directions this can go after we arrest the dictator, but a liberal democracy magically immediately popping isn't on my list. There might be one in the future but there will be a lot of chaos and violence between now and then.
What happened in Europe after WW2? Dick Cheney didn't invent the idea of America liberating a country and being greeted as liberators, it had happened before, specifically in countries that had a history of liberal democracy.
For some reason he thought it would apply to Islamic theocracies and it clearly didn't. Pattern matching Venezuela against Iraq or Afghanistan is an obvious mistake.