Kevin Barrett
If you’ve been following Trump’s build-up for war on Venezuela, and are experiencing feelings of déjà vu—specifically, the uncanny premonition that it’s 2003 all over again—your feelings are fully justified. Like George W. Bush in 2003, Trump is amassing forces off foreign shores in preparation for an invasion of an oil rich sovereign nation. And like his predecessor, Trump is working overtime to sell the war under ludicrously false pretenses.
Like Bush Jr. in 2003, Trump is mendaciously hyperventilating about a nonexistent but terrifying-sounding threat. For Bush, it was nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. For Trump, it’s another kind of alleged “chemical weapon”: fentanyl. In both cases, the link between the planned US invasion and the pretext is purely imaginary.
There was never any credible evidence that the relatively stable, prosperous, but sanctions-crippled pre-2003 Iraq possessed an arsenal of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. That story was pure propaganda, the product of overheated neoconservative imaginations. The neocons knew that to stampede the public into war, they needed to invent a terrifying big lie. “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” Bush famously intoned. In other words, who needs proof? Who needs evidence? Let’s just launch a huge war, slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, and ruin a whole nation, based on preposterous accusations backed up by nothing at all.
Trump’s claims about Venezuelan fentanyl are every bit as ludicrous as Bush’s WMD flim-flam. Trump has killed more than 80 people on the 20 boats his military has summarily blown up in extrajudicial killings that amount to premeditated first degree murder. But the Killer-in-Chief has not presented a shred of evidence that even one of those boats was carrying fentanyl. And we can safely surmise that they were not, for the obvious reason that almost all fentanyl consumed in the USA is manufactured in Mexico, not Venezuela or Columbia! Trump, whose cronies say has never read a book in his life, is no geographer, so he presumably doesn’t realize that Mexico lies immediately south of the US, in North America, while Venezuela and Columbia are in South America and cannot have anything to do with Mexico-produced fentanyl.
Trumps unhinged lies on the subject almost beggar belief. In one speech, Trump claimed that “every Venezuelan (fentanyl) boat”—of which there are none, as we have seen—“kills 25,000 people.” In another speech, the orange baboon stated that each boat he blows up “saves 25,000 American lives.” These are bizarre claims for many reasons, not the least of which is that if they were true, it would only take three drug boats to kill the roughly 75,000 Americans who overdose on Fentanyl every year. Since Trump has blown up 20 boats, he claims to have saved 500,000 people. Those numbers obviously do not add up. But they don’t need too, since there are no Venezuelan fentanyl boats. The whole thing is preposterous hogwash, a gross insult to the intelligence of the American people, the US armed forces, and the world.
While he murders innocent fisherman and boaters, Trump pardons actual drug smugglers. On December 3, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States. Even Republicans were shocked and baffled by the pardon, which revealed the whole “war on drugs” pretext for war on Venezuela as a total sham.
Demonization of Targeted Leaders
Trump is following Bush’s playbook not only by conjuring up an imaginary threat, but also by demonizing the leader of the nation he is lying about. Bush repeatedly called Saddam Hussein a “murderous tyrant,” a “brutal dictator,” a “master of deception” in charge of a “brutal regime” that ruled through “fear and cruelty,” a “homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction,” “a dangerous man who possesses the world’s most dangerous weapons,” “a homicidal dictator who routinely tortures and murders his own people” and “who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction,” “a totalitarian dictator,” “a madman,” “a coward who tortured his own people,” and so on.
Though there was a grain of truth to some of those charges, Saddam Hussein’s crimes were not among the reasons the US invaded Iraq. On the contrary, the US was complicit in Hussein’s worst atrocities: Iraqi chemical weapons attacks, using US-supplied mustard gas and nerve agents, against Iran during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, had personally authorized US-orchestrated shipments of those chemical weapons to Iraq during the 1980s, when Rumsfeld had been Reagan’s special envoy to Baghdad. Saddam Hussein used those weapons repeatedly, initially at the behest of the United States, killing over 100,000 people. Ironically, the same Rumsfeld who had armed Iraq with chemical weapons in 1983 led the invasion of the now-WMD-free Iraq twenty years later, under the false pretense that Iraq had WMD!
Bush demonized Iraq to obscure the real reason for the 2003 invasion: Saddam Hussein’s good qualities, not his bad ones. The Iraqi dictator, though brutal to his enemies, used Iraq’s oil revenue to provide first-class education, transportation, health, and other infrastructure for his people. Hussein was also committed to building a military powerhouse whose ultimate purpose was to liberate Palestine. And although he was willing to maintain cordial relations with the US, Hussein would never accede to American pressure to betray the Palestinians by appeasing the genocidal Zionist entity. These good qualities—not his brutality—were the real reasons the Zionist-occupied US turned on him.
Likewise, it is the positive aspects of Nicolas Maduro’s government in Caracas, not the negative ones, that have led the US to repeatedly try to overthrow it. Here again, Trump is borrowing from Bush’s playbook by hurling childish ad hominem attacks against the Venezuelan president. Like Bush insulting Saddam Hussein, Trump repeatedly lashes out at Maduro by calling him a “dictator” and a “thug.” Other Bush-like insults Trump has hurled at Maduro include: “He’s a puppet,” “a total failure,” “a fool,” “a loser,” “a criminal,” “a liar,” “a thug who kills his own people,” “a dictator hiding behind lies.”
There is far less truth in Trump’s anti-Maduro vitriol than in Bush’s anti-Saddam-Hussein tirades. Maduro enjoys widespread popular support, probably more than Trump does in the US. Like his Bolivarian predecessor Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader’s popularity extends outside his country to the entire Latin American left, which represents the majority of the intelligentsia of that part of the world. While many wealthy Venezuelans hate Maduro and the Bolivarian movement he represents, just as wealthy Cubans hated Fidel Castro, such people are considered “gusanos” (worms) by the ordinary people of those countries, who benefit from governments that focus on education and health care for the poor rather than profits for the rich.
Maduro is in fact a patriot who is risking his life to defend his country against its rapacious neighbor to the north. Unlike Trump, he is a thoughtful, cultivated man who can speak extemporaneously for extended periods with grace and coherence. A fixture at literary festivals and cultural campaigns, Maduro champions the work of the great patriotic Latin American writers including Eduardo Galeano, Rómulo Gallegos, and Luis Britto García. Unlike the US-centric oligarchs who hate him, Maduro knows we are put on Earth not to amass riches, but to live an ethical, contemplative life. Any unbiased student of character will quickly conclude that Trump is describing himself, not Maduro, when he bloviates about how “he’s a puppet,” “a total failure,” “a fool,” “a loser,” “a criminal,” “a liar,” and “a thug.”
Oil is Not the Primary Issue
The Trump regime’s real reasons for plotting against Venezuela have nothing to do with the “chemical weapon” fentanyl, nor with slanders against Maduro, any more than the 2003 Bush regime’s real reasons for invading Iraq involved WMD or Saddam Hussein’s character flaws. In both cases, the real reasons for war can be summed up in two words: “oil” and “Israel.”
Both Iraq and Venezuela are geo-strategically significant, and targeted by the US due to their huge oil reserves. Bush invaded Iraq in large part due to Iraq’s estimated 145 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Venezuela has 303 billion barrels, more than twice as much, making it the world leader. Whoever controls that oil can not only profit from it, but also offer it to friends and deny it to enemies.
But oil is not the primary issue in either Bush’s 2003 war or Trump’s 2025 re-run. Zionism is.
Maduro’s government, like Saddam Hussein’s in and indeed before 2003, has shown itself more than willing to cut American corporations in on its oil wealth on very favorable terms. But in neither case will the Americans take yes for an answer. Why not? Because both nations—Iraq in 2003 and Venezuela today—were and are committed to maintaining full sovereignty, one of whose expressions is a commitment to the Palestinian resistance struggle against Zionist genocide.
Today, Venezuela is strongly allied with the anti-genocide nations of Iran and Yemen. It maintains political, financial, and logistical ties with Hezbollah. And though Maduro’s Bolivarian government would be happy to strike win-win oil deals with US companies, it reserves the right to maintain a sovereign foreign policy in general, and to ally itself with the Palestinian people in their struggle against Zionist genocide in particular. This is exactly the same position that Saddam Hussein’s government assumed in 2003.
That’s unacceptable to the US, because the US is dominated by a disproportionately Jewish-Zionist billionaire oligarchy that is loyal not to US interests, but to the interests of the genocidal entity occupying Palestine. When an oil-rich, potentially powerful country like Iraq or Venezuela chooses to ally itself with the Palestinian liberation struggle, the Jewish Zionists insist that that country must be destroyed, no matter the cost in blood and treasure.
That’s why Bush and Trump have to lie about the reasons for war. If they told the truth—“the Zionist billionaire crime bosses want to run America into the ground by waging pointlessly destructive wars for Israel”—the American people might be tempted to put an end to that oligarchy, and to the malignant Zionist entity itself.
