{"id":318803,"date":"2025-11-21T07:47:26","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T07:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=318803"},"modified":"2025-11-23T08:29:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T08:29:33","slug":"war-in-venezuela-brought-to-you-by-the-same-people-who-lied-us-into-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=318803","title":{"rendered":"War in Venezuela, Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alain Stephens \u2013 The Intercept Nov 18, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The United States is amassing power off Venezuela\u2019s coast. Warships, Marine detachments, and surveillance aircraft are flowing into the Caribbean under the banner of \u201ccounter-narcotics operations.\u201d Military officials have presented Donald Trump<\/a> with various game plans for potential operations. The U.S. president is openly tying Nicol\u00e1s Maduro to narco-terror networks and cartel structures, while dangling both \u201ctalks\u201d and threatening the use of military force in the same breath<\/a>. It\u2019s all pushing toward the culmination of crowning Maduro and his government America\u2019s next top \u201cterrorists<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the magic movie-script label that means the bombs can start heating up.<\/p>\n

Then comes the media warm-up act: a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens, published on Monday, assuring readers in \u201cThe Case for Overthrowing Maduro\u201d that this is all modest, calibrated, even reasonable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse,\u201d Stephens writes. \u201cIntervention means war, and war means death. \u2026 The law of unintended consequences is unrepealable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The column\u2019s argument is simple: Relax. This isn\u2019t Iraq, a conflict Stephens helped cheerlead our way into and proudly declared in 2023<\/a> that two decades later, he doesn\u2019t regret supporting the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are also important differences between Venezuela and Iraq or Libya,\u201d he continues. \u201cThey include Trump\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Venezuela, Stephens argues, provides grounds for intervention against criminals in a failing state. Maduro is corrupt, the threat is real, and Trump\u2019s moves are not the opening shots of a war but the necessary application of restrained power. It\u2019s an argument Americans have heard before. And it\u2019s as familiar as the hardware now cruising toward Caracas.<\/p>\n

Everything Old Is New Again<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

But step back. There\u2019s nothing limited about an aircraft carrier strike group, including the world\u2019s largest warship<\/a>, moving into position near a country the United States has spent years sanctioning, isolating, and trying to politically dislodge. There\u2019s nothing modest about weaving \u201cnarco-terrorism<\/a>\u201d into the policy narrative, a label that conveniently sidesteps congressional authorization. And there\u2019s nothing reassuring about the president telling reporters he\u2019s open to \u201ctalks,\u201d while simultaneously telegraphing retaliatory force if Maduro doesn\u2019t yield.<\/p>\n

This is not law enforcement. It is coercive statecraft backed by military power. And when the press uncritically repeats the administration\u2019s framing, the escalation becomes easier to swallow.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve Seen This Movie Before<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Iraq should have been the end of innocence in American foreign-policy thinking. We toppled Saddam Hussein; what followed was not liberation but vacuum<\/a>. Power didn\u2019t flow to democratic institutions \u2014 it scattered, producing insurgency, sectarian collapse, and a national debt<\/a> Americans will never pay off.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve watched this choreography before too. In 2002, the Washington Post assured readers that toppling Saddam and invading Iraq would be \u2014 I kid you not \u2014 a \u201ccakewalk<\/a>.\u201d But the New York Times once again led the way: A 2001 piece titled \u201c<\/em>The U.S. Must Strike at Saddam Hussein<\/a>\u201d framed Saddam as driven by \u201chatred intensified by a tribal culture of the blood feud\u201d, and that preemptive war was America\u2019s moral duty. By 2003, the Times was profiling \u201cLiberals for War<\/a>,\u201d laundering the idea that even longtime doves were ready to get on board.<\/p>\n

And then there was the big one: In September 2002, the front-page report insisting Iraq\u2019s access to \u201caluminum tubes\u201d was \u201cintensifying its quest for bomb parts<\/a>,\u201d a claim that became one of the Bush administration\u2019s most potent talking points despite falling apart under scrutiny. Less than two years later, the Times quietly admitted what the country already knew: Its coverage \u201cwasn\u2019t as rigorous as it should have been<\/a>\u201d \u2014 an apology that did nothing for the dead, the displaced, or the war that never ended.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Its state infrastructure is brittle. A miscalculation \u2014 a strike, a naval confrontation, a retaliatory move from Maduro \u2014 could fracture what remains of the country\u2019s governance.<\/p>\n

Even in articles and political rhetoric selling the safe insistence this isn\u2019t anything<\/em> like Iraq, it\u2019s hitting the familiar beats: Redefine the battlefield as a courtroom<\/a>, call the targets \u201cterrorists,\u201d and pretend the spectators won\u2019t notice. It\u2019s the old Washington parlor trick \u2014 war recast as paperwork, missiles disguised as \u201cmeasured responses.\u201d 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\u2019t. Because the moment a U.S. service member dies in some hillside village most Americans couldn\u2019t find on a map last week, or a destroyer gets hit by something unseen in the dark<\/a>, the mission will shed every polite euphemism. It won\u2019t be \u201climited.\u201d It won\u2019t be \u201cprecision interdictions<\/a>.\u201d It will become the only war frame Washington and the political media never hesitates to embrace: American vengeance, expansive and unbounded.<\/p>\n

The Myth of \u201cLimited\u201d War<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The press should be asking harder questions, not just about the Pentagon\u2019s talking points, but about what kind of wars we\u2019re 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 economy<\/a>; we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s easy to forget from a corner suite in Washington or a standing desk in Manhattan. From that distance, war looks like a policy instrument, a rhetorical jousting match, an intellectualized game played on someone else\u2019s terrain. But the last two decades of living through America\u2019s post-Iraq unraveling should have taught us otherwise. A sharper press, the right questions, and a robust, skeptical stance toward American intervention abroad<\/a> could have spared lives: service members lost to missions with no endpoint<\/a>, civilians flattened as \u201ccollateral damage,\u201d entire regions left to absorb the shockwaves long after Washington moved on.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the distance the press should be interrogating \u2014 between the people who greenlight these missions and the people who have to live inside them. Because if we don\u2019t ask these questions now, we\u2019ll end up asking them years later, after the bills come due and the country pretends it never saw this coming.<\/p>\n

IT\u2019S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.<\/u><\/p>\n

What we\u2019re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

This is not hyperbole.<\/p>\n

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.<\/p>\n

Yet far too many are still covering Trump\u2019s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as \u201cunconventional,\u201d \u201ctesting the boundaries,\u201d and \u201caggressively flexing power.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?<\/h2>\n

Donate<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the U.S. amasses military power off Venezuela\u2019s coast, the mainstream media has begun to prepare the U.S. public for what looks increasingly likely. On Monday the NYT assured readers that \u201cThe Case for Overthrowing Maduro\u201d was entirely reasonable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":318805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=318803"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318804,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318803\/revisions\/318804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/318805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=318803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=318803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=318803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}