Déjà vu all over again

The definition of insanity is making the same mistake over and expecting a different outcome. By that definition, the Trump coup in Venezuela is insane. 

Maduro was a corrupt and illegitimate ruler. And the same was true of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Bush deposed Saddam, freeing Iraq from one nightmare but plunging it into another. The excuse in Iraq was phony charges of WMDs. The real reason was access to oil. Trump has deposed Maduro based on phony charges of drug manufacture and gang support. The real reason is access to oil.

 

Historian Juan Cole summarizes the five mistakes that Bush made in Iraq and that Trump is making in Venezuela:

 

“1. Violation of the UN Charter and the International laws of war

 

“The Bush administration attacked Iraq in 2003 without any foundation in international law. Iraq had not attacked the United States in the decade leading up to the American intervention. The UN Security Council, led by France, Russia and China, specifically declined to authorize the invasion. . . . Bush’s inability to secure significant support from any countries but the UK and Spain harmed his effort in Iraq and contributed to its failure. 

 

“The Trump administration attacked Venezuela and abducted of dictator Nicolas Maduro without the slightest justification in international law. The UN Charter forbids war except under two circumstances, self-defense or the designation of a country as a danger to international order by the UN Security Council. Venezuela had not militarily attacked the US. The UNSC had not called for international action against Maduro.

 

“2. False pretexts.

 

“The Bush administration alleged that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program and was two years away from blowing up a nuke. Iraq had had a small nuclear program in the 1980s but it was never very successful. It was dismantled after the Gulf War by UN inspectors, who oversaw the documented destruction of all Iraq’s chemical and biological and nuclear weapons programs. The revelation, once the US had occupied Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass destruction (a propaganda term) in that country fatally damaged the legitimacy of the Bush project and made the administration a laughingstock.

 

“The Trump administration charged Maduro with smuggling fentanyl to the United States and with overtly deploying the alleged Tren de Aragua cartel inside the US against U.S. interests. Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl. Tren de Aragua was a small prison gang that engaged in some criminality on the outside. It was dismantled in 2019. It has no known significant presence in the United States and certainly isn’t a state instrument, if it could be said to exist at all.

 

“3. No Plan for the next Day

 

“In the Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz . . . were convinced that the US could go into Iraq, decapitate the regime by killing or capturing Saddam Hussein, and withdraw within 6 months. 

 

“The Trump administration appears to have had made no plans for the day after. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said that the operation was over once Maduro was abducted, implying that the Bolivarian government would remain in place and that Vice President Delcy Rodriguez would succeed Maduro. But the Venezuelan opposition suggested that Maduro’s opponent in the disputed 2024 election, Edmundo González, should take over. Trump himself said that the US would run Venezuela for some time. 

 

“4. The Oil Factor.

 

“Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in 2003 that Iraqi petroleum would pay for the US invasion of that country. The Bush wars actually cost $5.6 trillion by 2018, including projections of lifetime health care payments through the VA for the thousands of severely wounded veterans. 

 

“President Trump spoke Saturday about his plans to have US petroleum majors reinvigorate the Venezuelan oil industry, which has been under US sanctions since 2017. Administration officials also maintained that Venezuelan petroleum proceeds would pay for the US attack on that country.

 

“5. Under-estimation of polarization and potential for destabilization.

 

“The Bush administration . . . underestimated the polarization of Iraqi society. Some of the divisions were sectarian, between Sunnis and Shiites. Others were class-based. Thus, the urban poor mobilized behind fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who formed the Mahdi Army militia that engaged in battles with the US Marines. Secular urban Sunnis and fundamentalist Sunnis from small towns formed some 60 major guerrilla groups that sniped at and set improvised explosive devices for US troops. Bush created 75% unemployment in Sunni areas while putting the former underclass, the Shiites, in power. By 2014 the extremist hyper-Sunni group ISIL was able to detach 40% of Iraqi territory from the country and to engage in massacres of Shiites . . . .

 

“Venezuela is an extremely polarized society . . . under Maduro poverty soared and some 8 million Venezuelans fled the country. Since Americans are trained not to analyze using social class and are encouraged to focus on personalities and horse races instead, they are at a disadvantage in understanding the social fissures in other societies. Maduro had shifted his political base from the poor to sections of the business classes, and while that meant that after the stolen 2024 election the barrios demonstrated against him just as did the upscale Caracas neighborhoods, his removal could reopen the question of division of society’s goods — a question that led to Chavez’s rise in the first place. Class conflict is real in Venezuela, and a political vacuum could unleash it.”

 

As psychoanalyst Theodor Reik wrote: “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

https://www.juancole.com/2026/01/mistakes-making-venezuela.html