In the annals of modern international relations, few moments carry as heavy a legacy as the speech given by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. With solemn authority, Powell presented what he called “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The world watched. The Security Council listened. The invasion of Iraq soon followed.

Yet nearly every core assertion Powell made that day collapsed under post-war scrutiny. Iraq, it turned out, had no active WMD program. The biological labs, the chemical weapons, the nuclear revival—none existed. The damage, however, had been done: hundreds of thousands of lives lost, regional instability that persists two decades later, and a critical blow to the credibility of the international system.

The latest fact-checking report on statements made by the US ambassador to the United Nations at the Security Council emergency meeting on December 23, 2025 evokes Powell’s fateful moment with uncomfortable clarity. Assertions regarding Venezuela—about narco-terrorism networks, stolen oil, and naval interdictions—were advanced with the same kind of urgency and confidence that once shaped the Iraq invasion narrative. But just like 2003, these claims are not being matched by publicly verifiable evidence.

At the center of the current controversy is the claim that Venezuelan oil revenues finance a powerful criminal entity known as the “Cartel de los Soles.” Yet no evidentiary chain has been produced to establish this link: no verifiable financial tracing, no adjudicated findings, and no independent corroboration by multilateral investigative bodies. Even UN human-rights experts have questioned the coherence and existence of the cartel as a unified organization.

What the 2003 Iraq experience makes painfully clear is that institutional credibility depends on the ability to separate fact from political fiction.

Equally troubling is the claim that this alleged cartel poses a major narcotics or terrorist threat to the United States. The US Drug Enforcement Administration’s own 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment identifies Mexican transnational criminal organizations—not Venezuelan entities—as the principal threat. The Venezuelan organization does not even appear in the assessment.

Assertions have also been........

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