Insanity redux: Shock and awe in Venezuela

Baghdad? No, bombs over Caracas last night

Almost the only difference between what you saw on television today and what you saw in 2003 is that Donald Trump didn’t put on a flight suit and land on an aircraft carrier to announce his Venezuelan “mission accomplished.”

Along with a bunch of guys in suits standing stone-faced in front of American flags, every element of the madness that got us involved in the mess that was our misbegotten attempt to take over Iraq was there:

It’s going to pay for itself. Remember that one? The invasion of Iraq won’t cost us a penny because…oil. Trump said the same thing about six times today. “We’ll probably make a little profit,” he bragged. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”

Okaaaaay…

We’re designating various people to run Venezuela. Who is going to be in charge there, now that they don’t have a president? “We’re going to let you know who those people are that would run Venezuela. It’s largely going to be for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me. We’re going to be running it.”

Somebody should find Paul Bremer, the incompetent dingbat who ran the Coalition Provisional Authority, and ask him how that worked out in Iraq. He was the U.S. Presidential Envoy and Administrator of Iraq after Bush fired the retired general he had first put in the job. Bremer was the genius who disbanded the Iraqi army and outlawed the Baath Party, Saddam Hussein’s regime that ran the country, plunging Iraq into sectarian warfare and the insurgency that turned into what we now call the war in Iraq.

But there won’t be any problems in Venezuela, will there? I mean, all we’re doing is taking their oil. Oh, I almost forgot. It’s a snap of the fingers! We’ve got the greatest military in the world, exactly like we had in 2003!

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.” That sentence, uttered today by Donald Trump, was a carbon copy of what Dick Cheney told the American people before the invasion of Iraq. Cheney also assured us that we would be greeted like conquering heroes because we got rid of a terrible dictator and gave Iraq back to its people. Today, asked if the U.S. military would have a presence in Venezuela, Trump looked momentarily confused and then assured Americans that we would need only enough boots on the ground to protect the oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”

We’re going to put the failing oil infrastructure back together and sell oil all over the world. Yeah, you and how many soldiers did you say you’d need? Iraq was pumping about 1.5 million barrels a day before we invaded in 2003. It took a year to get back to that level, and more years to reach Iraq’s pre-invasion goal of about 2.5 million barrels a day. Trump thinks all he has to do is call some of his oil buddies who had “their oil stolen” back in the 70’s…which he referred to repeatedly as “25 years ago.”

That would be Chevron and Exxon-Mobil and the rest of the guys who told us in 2024 that they were going to “invest” in Trump hoping for the big payoff he tells them they will get today. Oh, I almost forgot. Trump also cancelled all wind projects and ended solar subsidies, another gift to the oil companies. What do you need wind and solar for, when you’ve got Venezuela’s oil?

The operation last night in Venezuela was because “they did very bad things to us.” The “very bad thing” that Iraq did to us was WMD, which Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the rest of them couldn’t find despite the “excellent intelligence” that told them it was there. Trump couldn’t shut up about the “excellent intelligence” that contributed to his big victory last night in Caracas. This is the guy who said he didn’t trust his own intelligence agencies report on Russian influence in the 2016 election; he trusted Putin. Trump sent DOGE into the CIA and NSA and every other place with “intelligence” in its title, so he could fire everyone who wasn’t loyal to him. He has not had an intelligence briefing that we’ve heard of, unless you count what his aides tell him about the course conditions at Trump Doral Golf Club.

The murderers’ row of national security officials couldn’t say enough about the brilliant president who decided it was a good idea to go into a foreign country and depose its leader because of oil. Pete “Pop my jacket buttons with pride” Hegseth emerged with the brownest nose of all at today’s press conference. Trump’s operational “courage, leadership, and resolve are the most powerful combination the world has ever seen,” Hegseth burbled. Remember who was the genius in 2003? George W. Bush. At his first cabinet meeting, Bush’s vice president walked into the room and passed out copies of a map of Iraq that had been divided like a pizza, with the names of American oil companies written in each section. That was in February of 2001. Two years later, oil companies and Halliburton, the oil services company, of which Cheney had been president and CEO from 1995 to 2000, were standing in line in Kuwait to follow U.S. forces into Iraq.

That’s enough, don’t you think? The analogies between Iraq and Venezuela are so many and so complete, they’re stunning, including the fact that in the 1970’s, at the same time Venezuela was nationalizing its oil production, Saddam nationalized the stakes held by oil companies from the U.S. and Great Britain and France.

Alongside the memory of George W. Bush, the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein loomed over Trump at his press conference today. The week after the DOJ announced that it has found another 5.2 million pages of Epstein documents that must be gone through and redacted so Trump’s name doesn’t show up, the same DOJ is very much a factor in the “arrest” of that terrible drug dealer Maduro in Venezuela, so he can be brought back to the United States to “face justice.” How is Trump going to accomplish this? Did they fly Maduro and his wife on a helicopter to a U.S. base in the Caribbean, so they could be put on an Air Force jet and flown to the U.S. to face an arraignment?

No, they stuck them on the amphibious assault ship, the USS Iwo Jima, which as we speak is steaming north to New York Harbor, where with great fanfare, the evil Maduro and his wife will be debarked and face a judge in New York City, where Fox News and every right-wing podcaster on earth will have a front row seat for the whole glorious thing.

We won’t be talking about Epstein next week! We’ll be talking about Nicolas Maduro! At least, that’s what Trump hopes.

Incidentally, Trump was asked by one enterprising reporter why he went to the trouble of a major military operation to arrest the president of one South American country alleged to be a drug lord, when he just pardoned another president of a Central American country who was convicted of the same offense and was serving time in a U.S. prison.

Trump gave the same five letter answer he has for everything. Biden. The former president was very mean to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez. How did he know this? Trump turned slightly and indicated the men standing behind him, who included his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “They told me,” he said.

Trump went on to brag for a few moments on how many wars he had ended, except for the one in Ukraine that he thought would be “the easiest.” He said that right now, he is very unhappy with Vladimir Putin, because he is “killing too many people.” But that war isn’t his fault. It’s not even Putin’s, apparently. Whose fault is it? Biden. Trump said that war would never have happened if the 2020 election hadn’t been stolen from him. Who told him there wouldn’t have been a war in Ukraine, you might wonder? Putin.

I have to tell you, I had a cold-flash watching Trump’s press conference. It’s as if the last 20-plus years never happened. Trump and his genius combined forces operation rolled into Caracas just like we rolled into Baghdad, with bombs going off in the dark, explosions visible across an urban landscape…

Shock and awe all over again. Oil all over again. Taking back what was “stolen” from us, all over again.

Blood will be spilled, all over again. But this time, as Trump said, it won’t be “10,000 miles away.” This time, it will be in our backyard, where blood is just as red and bodies are just as dead as they are 10,000 miles away.