Iraq and Venezuela: One as Tragedy, Another as Farce

The invasion of Venezuela we’ve just witnessed brings to mind the two invasions of Iraq—under George H. W. Bush in 1990 and George W. Bush in 2003. The first was flagrantly about oil. The second was more insidious.

In a reactionary response to 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq nearly two years later, allegedly to combat terrorism through regime change despite evidence that the perps of the atrocity were elsewhere. The rationale for the operation was also belied by the fact that our forces had invaded Afghanistan in the weeks following 9/11.

The invasion of Iraq was sold to the American public through the Bush administration’s hyped-up claim that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell, a credible foreign policy figure, was put forward to present the evidence used to justify the intervention, later admitting that he was pressured.

We still live with the effects of this feckless blunder, which led to the massacre of 1.4 million civilians and the over-elevation of the Shia population at the expense of the Sunnis, which subsequently led to the creation of ISIS.

Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense and arguably the major force in pushing this policy. was driven by oiI concerns. In the 1970s, he was the Nixon administration’s emissary tasked with pressuring the Iraqis to reverse their recent nationalization of the oil industry. His maneuvers were not successful; the decade was rife with anti-colonial ruptures, extensions of the post-WWII backlash from the Third World against imperial repression. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 fulfilled Nixon’s, Rumsfeld’s, and Bush’s designs for this reversal.

Despite the earlier failure, the 1970s did witness severe crackdowns against these successful ruptures. As director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush sanctioned the military coup against Chile’s president Salvador Allende for nationalizing the copper, iron, banking, and steel industries.

The anti-colonial rupture in Venezuela occurred in 1976 when the government created an organization, PDVSA, which through the years seized the oil assets of Exxon, Gulf, Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips (Chevron still operates in Venezuela). Attempts by the U.S. to reverse the process were unsuccessful—the firms were only able to continue limited operations in Venezuela through joint ventures under the umbrella of state ownership.

In the early 2000s, this control and expropriation was increased under Hugo Chavez, the architect of the Bolivarian Revolution, forcing the companies to seek remedies for their investment losses through international arbitration. (They were adequately compensated eventually.)

But in 2017, the U.S. imposed financial sanctions on Venezuela that restricted bond trading and access to capital markets here, explicitly targeting the oil sector at the core of the Maduro government’s revenue. In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned PDVSA, froze 7 billion dollars in U.S.-based assets, and blocked payments for Venezuelan oil exports to this country, aiming to cripple state oil revenues and pressure regime change by cutting off Maduro’s access to revenues. And more recently, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on exports to the U.S. from any country buying Venezuelan oil.

The Venezuelan economy had already taken a dip before the 2017 sanctions were imposed, resulting in significant migration to the U.S. and other countries. But post-2017 has witnessed a compounding of these numbers, with the bulk of the migrants to this country over the past several years coming from Venezuela, Cuba, and Guatemala. The United States caused this critical migration crisis from Venezuela and now penalizes its victims by deporting them back to their deprived origins.

History is certainly repeating itself. The U.S. is out to reclaim its oil once again, oil that somehow ended up in another country. Trump could not mince his words.

This is not the only issue. The U.S. is committed to out-maneuver Russia and China in the country based on a paranoia rooted in refusal to accept the emerging multi-polar world. And of course there’s the mandate to combat drug trafficking, always laudable as a public relations initiative though its incidence is credibly far greater in other countries. Could this issue be the “lite” equivalent of the WMD claims that preceded the invasion of Iraq? True, it’s not easy to ignore the issues with Maduro’s governance, especially the fact that he retained his grip on power when he wasn’t re-elected. But how can the U.S., which has severe governance problems of its own, police a sovereign country?

This is indeed a farce. There was no invasion like in Iraq, only the kidnapping of a sitting president that appears destined to be mostly symbolic since the Trump administration has stated its intention to work with the survivors in Maduro’s government. This suggests no regime change, which would require substantial personnel on the ground. The likelihood of this outcome is further supported by the presence of a diverse and educated populace steeped in traditions of resistance.

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