War in Venezuela, Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq

Supporters of President Nicol s Maduro participate in a march to swear in the Bolivarian Grassroots Committees in Caracas Venezuela on Nov Photo Pedro Mattey Anadolu via Getty Images The United States is amassing power off Venezuela s coast Warships Marine detachments and surveillance aircraft are flowing into the Caribbean under the banner of counter-narcotics operations Military personnel have presented Donald Trump with various competition plans for probable operations The U S president is openly tying Nicol s Maduro to narco-terror networks and cartel structures while dangling both talks and threatening the use of military force in the same breath It s all pushing toward the culmination of crowning Maduro and his establishment America s next top terrorists the magic movie-script label that means the bombs can start heating up Then comes the media warm-up act a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens published on Monday assuring readers in The Scenario for Overthrowing Maduro that this is all modest calibrated even reasonable The serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse Stephens writes Intervention means war and war means death The law of unintended consequences is unrepealable The column s argument is simple Relax This isn t Iraq a conflict Stephens helped cheerlead our way into and proudly declared in that two decades later he doesn t regret supporting the war There are also key differences between Venezuela and Iraq or Libya he continues They include Trump s clear reluctance to put U S boots on the ground for any extended period And they include the fact that we can learn from our past mistakes Venezuela Stephens argues provides grounds for intervention against criminals in a failing state Maduro is corrupt the threat is real and Trump s moves are not the opening shots of a war but the necessary application of restrained power It s an argument Americans have heard before And it s as familiar as the hardware now cruising toward Caracas Everything Old Is New Again The echoes of Iraq are everywhere the moral certainty the insistence on a narrow mission laws stretched to accommodate force the journalist class nudging readers toward the idea of escalation The Times leans on that posture the intellectual confidence that if a dictator is cruel enough if his country is chaotic enough then U S firepower is not only justified but prudent and even moral Related Bush s Iraq War Lies Created a Blueprint for Donald Trump But step back There s nothing limited about an aircraft carrier strike group including the world s largest warship moving into position near a country the United States has spent years sanctioning isolating and trying to politically dislodge There s nothing modest about weaving narco-terrorism into the program narrative a label that conveniently sidesteps congressional authorization And there s nothing reassuring about the president telling reporters he s open to talks while simultaneously telegraphing retaliatory force if Maduro doesn t yield This is not law enforcement It is coercive statecraft backed by military power And when the press uncritically repeats the administration s framing the escalation becomes easier to swallow We ve Seen This Movie Before Iraq should have been the end of innocence in American foreign-policy thinking We toppled Saddam Hussein what followed was not liberation but vacuum Power didn t flow to democratic institutions it scattered producing insurgency sectarian collapse and a national debt Americans will never pay off We ve watched this choreography before too In the Washington Post assured readers that toppling Saddam and invading Iraq would be I kid you not a cakewalk But the New York Times once again led the way A piece titled The U S Must Strike at Saddam Hussein framed Saddam as driven by hatred intensified by a tribal practices of the blood feud and that preemptive war was America s moral duty By the Times was profiling Liberals for War laundering the idea that even longtime doves were ready to get on board Related New York Times Makes Glaring Error About Iraq War Then Corrects It Incorrectly And then there was the big one In September the front-page summary insisting Iraq s access to aluminum tubes was intensifying its quest for bomb parts a claim that became one of the Bush administration s largest part potent talking points despite falling apart under scrutiny Less than two years later the Times quietly admitted what the country already knew Its coverage wasn t as rigorous as it should have been an apology that did nothing for the dead the displaced or the war that never ended The argument that a conflict with Venezuela is any different hinges on the fantasy that U S firepower can topple a foreign regime without creating irreversible instability But Venezuela is already in economic freefall Its state infrastructure is brittle A miscalculation a strike a naval confrontation a retaliatory move from Maduro could fracture what remains of the country s governance Even in articles and political rhetoric selling the safe insistence this isn t anything like Iraq it s hitting the familiar beats Redefine the battlefield as a courtroom call the targets terrorists and pretend the spectators won t notice It s the old Washington parlor trick war recast as paperwork missiles disguised as measured responses But beneath the soothing language is the real hazard This posture locks the United States into a glide path toward escalation It casts Maduro as a stationary object America can strike without consequence right up until he isn t Because the moment a U S provision member dies in particular hillside village the majority Americans couldn t find on a map last week or a destroyer gets hit by something unseen in the dark the mission will shed every polite euphemism It won t be limited It won t be precision interdictions It will become the only war frame Washington and the political media never hesitates to embrace American vengeance expansive and unbounded The Myth of Limited War The press should be asking harder questions not just about the Pentagon s talking points but about what kind of wars we re willing to inherit What do we expect these campaigns to become once they outlast the news cycle and the political administration that started them What do they cost us in dollars in decades in the quiet bleed of national attention Americans are already living through a squeezed financial sector we can t afford another open-ended conflict with the only measure of success being the upkeep of a strained momentum to throw bodies and dollars at finishing what we ultimately started Related Daniel Ellsberg Required Americans to See the Truth About War But that s easy to forget from a corner suite in Washington or a standing desk in Manhattan From that distance war looks like a initiative instrument a rhetorical jousting match an intellectualized championship played on someone else s terrain But the last two decades of living through America s post-Iraq unraveling should have taught us otherwise A sharper press the right questions and a robust skeptical stance toward American intervention abroad could have spared lives operation members lost to missions with no endpoint civilians flattened as collateral damage entire regions left to absorb the shockwaves long after Washington moved on That s the distance the press should be interrogating between the people who greenlight these missions and the people who have to live inside them Because if we don t ask these questions now we ll end up asking them years later after the bills come due and the country pretends it never saw this coming The post War in Venezuela Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq appeared first on The Intercept