Pipeline wars

Decaying Venezuelan oil pipeline: Bloomberg

Let’s say you are an American president, and you decide that with all the oil being produced in your own country – the U.S. is the world’s top oil producer, pumping more than 13 million barrels a day – that is not enough. You want more oil. You want oil from Iraq. You want oil from Syria. Those places are far, far away, in the Middle East.

And then you look south, in your own hemisphere, and you see Venezuela, and you think, I’d like some oil from there. We used to have American oil companies in that South American country. Then in 1976 – 50 years ago – Venezuela nationalized its oil industry and took over the oil fields and infrastructure built by American oil companies.

You are an American president whose favorite word, next to “billions,” is “unfair.” You think to yourself, how unfair it was to take all that oil away from U.S. oil companies. You don’t like the president who’s running Venezuela, this Maduro guy, because he doesn’t show you the respect you think you are due as the King of All That You See. So, you decide you’ll get rid of the disrespectful dictator of Venezuela, and you will take the oil.

You see yourself as much, much smarter than the bumbling George W. Bush, whose major error, when he invaded Iraq to get rid of its disrespectful dictator, Saddam Hussein, did not take the oil. You ignore the fact that the Bush family – Junior and Senior both – were in the oil business in Texas, so they at least knew something of what was involved in taking the oil, whether it was out of the ground in the U.S. or out of a foreign country such as Iraq.

You think you are smarter than George W. Bush because you know a lot of oil men. They supported your campaign in 2024. They have come to visit you at your resort/hotel/home in Palm Beach, Mar a Lago, and they have come to visit you in the White House. Some of those oil men run the companies whose oil was stolen from them back in 1976. They want their oil back, and you told them that you would get it for them, probably for a royalty (wonderful word, that one) to be paid to you personally through whatever your latest crypto scam is.

So, you call up your spray-tanned and tattooed Secretary of War, and you tell him, go get that fuckstick Maduro in Venezuela and put him in jail in New York City and take their oil.

There is always a problem. This is a rare one that isn’t caused by Democrats, or at least you haven’t figured out a way to blame it on Democrats yet. What do you do after you depose a South American dictator? Bush famously didn’t have a plan after he got rid of Saddam. It became his nickname: George W. “didn’t have a plan” Bush.

You don’t have a plan, either. What you have is a gaggle of yes-men, just like Bush had, who tell you not to worry, that you are King of All You See, so taking the oil won’t be a problem. You have the greatest military in the history of the world. Hell, your greatest military has been killing drug smugglers in boats for months now – the count is more than 100 – and it took your greatest military only two hours to spirit Maduro out of his fortified compound and put him on the USS Iwo Jima to send him on his way to New York City, where the national media is waiting to report on everything that happens to him in court, so they won’t be reporting on the 5.2 million new Jeffrey Epstein files. Or at least they won’t be reporting on the files as much.

What could go wrong down there in Venezuela? Your Chief Adviser on Everything in the World, Stephen Miller, tells you that power is the only thing you need to get whatever you want. The world will cower in the shadow of your power, says Stephen Miller. He even went on TV on Sunday and explained to Jake Tapper how you did what you did in Venezuela:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So, for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country.”

See, that’s all it takes. You pick up the phone, you go on Truth Social, you say some stuff in ALL CAPS, and the world bends to your will.

Except for those pesky people who live in the countries from which you want to take the oil, and some of the pesky people who don’t even live in those countries.

Look at what happened in Iraq when Bush took over the country from Saddam Hussein. He hired some big U.S. companies such as KBR and Halliburton and Bechtel to go to Iraq and rebuild the country’s “infrastructure.” The Congress passed a $70 billion supplemental funding bill in November of 2003 to pay for the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure. I was in Iraq when that bill was passed. A West Point classmate of mine was in charge of USAID in Baghdad. All the infrastructure money was to go through USAID to help rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure so the big U.S. companies could get the oil fields pumping and the oil pipelines running. My friend, the USAID guy, told me all of the rebuilding money was going to the oil infrastructure. Not for sanitation and roads and rail systems and the electrical grid, except as those systems served the Iraqi oil business.

This was not reported in the press. One of the big U.S. companies, the Bechtel Corporation, issued a press release announcing its contract with USAID to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure. The press release was a lie. For one thing, Bechtel was hired with rebuilding oil infrastructure in northern Iraq, but the Americans working for the company got shot at and mortared and attacked by insurgents so much, they pulled out.

Attacks in northern Iraq on pipelines that carried oil from the Kurdish region around Kirkuk to a pipeline that ran north towards Turkey and south towards Baiji and Baghdad took place nightly. The 101^st Airborne Division, one brigade of which was stationed near Al-Qayyarah, was tasked with defending the pipeline that ran near the Tigris River. Well, they didn’t have enough soldiers to defend more than 100 miles of pipeline. Insurgents would watch where the U.S. soldiers went on their defensive patrols, then they would go to where the soldiers weren’t, and they would blow up a section of the pipeline, which ran aboveground, and was vulnerable to attacks with as simple a weapon as an IED made from a 155 mm Howitzer round, of which there were thousands in Iraq.

The Bechtel guys weren’t working on the infrastructure; the U.S. Army couldn’t defend the oil pipeline from Kirkuk, or the pipeline that ran north and south along the Tigris. So, what was happening? A comparatively small number of Iraqi insurgents were stymying American efforts to “take the oil.”

It’s still happening. Last summer, insurgents supported by Iran used drones to attack oilfields and pipelines run by Americans in the Kurdish region of Iraq. They hit an oil field run by HKN Energy, a company owned by the son of Texas billionaire Ross Perot, a big financial supporter of Donald Trump. According to Reuters, the Iran-backed insurgents also hit an Iraqi oil field run by another Texas oil company, Hunt Oil.

These are all friends of Donald Trump. According to Reuters, the attacks halted half of the Kurdistan region’s oil production. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio got very mad. He told Iraq’s leaders in Baghdad that Trump would impose sanctions on Iraq’s oil business if they did not reopen the oil pipeline to Turkey that led to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. Facing sanctions, Iraq and Turkey got together and reopened the pipeline, tilting Iraq away from its relationship with Iran and towards the U.S., according to Reuters.

All because some oil fields and an oil pipeline were attacked by Iran-backed insurgents.

In 2003, the attacks on the same pipeline were carried out by Iraqis on foot carrying IED’s in canvas sacks. Now those attacks can be carried out remotely by a guy sitting in a building somewhere looking at a little screen holding what amounts to a video game controller in his hands.

There are a zillion factions in Iraq today. There were a zillion factions in Iraq in 2003. There were vulnerable pipelines then, there are vulnerable pipelines now. The lesson here is that this shit never stops. There is always someone who doesn’t want American companies to “take the oil.”

What do you think is going to happen in Venezuela with its oil fields and oil pipelines when Trump sends American companies down there to “take the oil?” There are drug gangs like Tren de Aragua and Cartel de las Soles who are running cocaine through the areas where pipelines are. There is the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia, which has strong units and allies in Venezuela. The FARC guerilla group from Colombia still has factions operating in Venezuela. There are so-called Colectivos, pro-government militias which control neighborhoods of Caracas and areas of Venezuela and frequently do battle with countervailing gangs and militias from the other side of the political spectrum.

There are pro-government militias and anti-government militias in Venezuela just like there were in Iraq. When we invaded, the sectarian struggle between the Shiites and Sunnis did not suddenly come to a stop just because George W. Bush got a hair up his ass and sent American soldiers there. When the Iraqi army was disbanded, factions formed their own militias. Some of them funded their operations by hacking into pipelines, stealing oil and selling it on the black market.

Gee, do you think that a country such as Venezuela, with a major system of cocaine production and smuggling, might also have a system of stealing oil and selling it on the black market? Bloomberg Business says it’s already happening. Do you think that there might be people in Venezuela who liked Maduro, and voted for him, who are unhappy that he was kidnapped? Do you think they might have an opinion about what happens to the oil in Venezuela that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller think is their right to take as Big Powerful People? Do you think that there might be some groups who plan to attack the complex system of oil pipelines that run through Venezuela to stop the U.S. from taking the oil?

This is how stupid Trump and Miller and Rubio are. They announced what they want to do with Venezuela’s oil. Trump used the word “oil” twenty times in his press conference about the attack on Venezuela at Mar a Lago on Sunday. Trump said Venezuela owes us oil, because they took it from us, so we’re going to take it back. I’m pretty sure they can get CNN International in Venezuela. They know we’re coming.

At least Bush and Cheney had the sense to tell a big fat lie that they weren’t in Iraq to take the oil, even though they were there for exactly that and used USAID to funnel borrowed money that wasn’t even appropriated from taxpayer funds in the U.S. Treasury to fund their attempt to rebuild and take over Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

We are still paying interest on those borrowed billions. How long will we be paying interest on the money Trump and Miller and Rubio spend to “take the oil” from Venezuela they think American oil companies are owed?

Because we know one thing for sure from the incredibly ill-advised adventure in Iraq that left us in debt for about two trillion dollars: Whatever we get up to in Venezuela won’t pay for itself. Trump thinks that “running the country” of Venezuela, to use Stephen Miller’s arrogant assertion, will make the U.S. and Trump rich. What neither of them understand is that when you exercise power using the U.S. military, it doesn’t make money. It costs money. Lots and lots of money, and usually American lives as well.