STUART VARNEY (HOST): Staying on Venezuela, earlier this week John Bolton on this program said all options on the table when it comes to getting [Nicolás] Maduro out. Doug Bandow with us now, senior foreign policy adviser at the Cato Institute. I know where you're coming from Doug, you don't think we should use military intervention, I got it, but if we take it off the table we have no threat. So you don't take it off the table, but you don't necessarily use it. What do you say?
DOUG BANDOW (CATO INSTITUTE): Well, the problem is if you're going to make a threat you have to be willing to live up to it. So the challenge for us is if we make a threat that we're really not willing to follow through on, then we lose credibility. To my mind you use the military for absolutely essential things, it's a last resort. We don't have that here. It's an extraordinary challenge how to get rid of Maduro. He needs to go, but I think it's far more a political problem, not a military problem.
VARNEY: Should we use the CIA? I realize I'm going back to the late 1950s or something. But I mean why not? Why not? The guy is a corrupt socialist dictator. He's killing his own people in the street. Why can't we have the CIA have a quiet word with a couple of generals, get him out the country, why not?
BANDOW: Well, if it was that simple it'd be nice to do. The challenge, of course, is who replaces him. We can't be certain that whatever follows him is going to be something better. The question is how can we make it easier for the people there to overthrow him. What we're doing now I think has had extraordinary success at building international support. Other Latin American countries are actually willing to push on this. We need to keep this up. He needs to be under pressure, but we want to be very careful about blowing things up in a way that could explode badly for the people there.
