There Are Similarities, but Venezuela Is Not Iraq

After U.S. soldiers seized President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, The Daily Show turned its gimlet eye on the arguments for American military intervention there, inviting viewers to conclude that we’re looking at a new version of the case for the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The montage opens with Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary at the time, declaring in a March 2003 television interview, “We’re giving them (Iraqi leaders) full opportunity to do it the easy way. And when it doesn’t work, we’ll do it the hard way.”

The video cuts to President Donald Trump telling reporters aboard Air Force One, “If we can do things the easy way, that’s fine. And if we have to do it the hard way, that’s fine too.”

The piece includes other parallels. President George W. Bush’s warning in late 2002 that there were “al-Qaida terrorists inside Iraq” turns into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling Latin American drug cartels “the al-Qaida of our hemisphere.”

The Bush White House’s warning of supposed Iraqi chemical weapons programs becomes the Trump administration calling fentanyl a chemical weapon. (And don’t forget the president labeled fentanyl, which chiefly comes from Mexico, a “weapon of mass destruction” in December.)

I could note other parallels as well, like the idea that oil wealth in Iraq or Venezuela will effectively pay for the costs of any conflict.

But let’s not rush to oversimplify.

The Justification 

First, American presidents have recycled these kinds of arguments for going to war for as long as I’ve been alive – these are not particular to the conflict that began in 2003. A threat to Americans? Alleged terrorism? We’ve heard this before, many times.

You can spot some of these arguments – or something very close to them – when commanders-in-chief have made the case for military action in Afghanistan, the broader war on terrorism, Syria and even the invasion of another Latin American country, Panama, in December 1989.

“Many attempts have been made to resolve this crisis through diplomacy and negotiations,” President George H. W. Bush said in an address to the nation the day that operation began. “All were rejected by the dictator of Panama, General Manuel Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker.”

In other words: We tried the easy way, then had to resort to the hard way.

There are also two very obvious differences in the messaging:

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough related a recent conversation with Trump in which the president declared: “The difference between Iraq and this is that (Bush) didn’t keep the oil. We’re going to keep the oil.”

Two Big Differences

OK, so the messaging isn’t unique to Iraq and Venezuela and there are profound rhetorical differences. Let’s not overlook two very important practical differences between the two conflicts.

The first is that it does not look like we’re waging full-scale war with Venezuela (and not just because only Congress gets to declare war and hasn’t). The United States surely committed an act of war by carrying out strikes on sovereign Venezuelan soil and seizing Maduro. But unlike in Iraq, there’s no massive invasion force on the ground.

What we saw over the weekend was a military strike, but whether it turns into sustained conflict is an open question. I will note, however, that Trump and top aides have said more attacks are coming if Caracas bucks Washington’s demands.

The second difference looks to me like a Trump administration decision to avoid two of the biggest mistakes of the 2003 invasion: The disbanding of the Iraqi army and the purge of Saddam Hussein loyalists from every level of government and the military, a process known as de-Baathification after Saddam’s “Ba’ath” Party.

Those policies left thousands upon thousands of angry Iraqi men – many of them with guns – unemployed and under military occupation. It’s widely blamed for fueling the deadly insurgency against American forces and for former Iraqi military officials aiding the rise of ISIS.

What we see in Venezuela today is the Maduro regime chugging along, without Maduro but run by his allies, albeit under threat from the United States.

That doesn’t mean Venezuela won’t topple into the kind of deadly chaos that bedeviled Iraq under U.S. occupation. But the variance in both moves and messaging make it clear you can’t neatly overlay Baghdad and Caracas.