Trump is repeating the mistakes of Iraq in Venezuela |
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, memorably declared at a press conference in Baghdad on 14 December 2003, a day after US troops had captured Saddam Hussein. Iraqis in the audience broke out in cheers, leapt up from their seats and pumped their fists in the air – many had waited decades for that moment. “This is a great day in Iraq’s history,” Bremer said, adding: “The tyrant is a prisoner.”
I was in the audience that day in Baghdad, covering the Iraq invasion’s aftermath as a correspondent for a US newspaper. It quickly became clear that Bremer and other jubilant US officials would use the occasion – US soldiers dragged the disheveled former Iraqi dictator out of a hole in the ground where he had been hiding near his home town – to declare that America’s war had reached a decisive turn. Despite a growing insurgency led by ex-members of the Iraqi security forces, US officials in Baghdad and Washington projected confidence that victory was in sight now that Saddam was locked up and headed for the gallows.
That turned out to be wishful thinking, as the Iraq war and insurgency dragged on for years. Saddam’s capture was ultimately a minor blip – and the first in a series of “we got him” episodes, where US officials would celebrate the arrest or killing of an insurgent or jihadist leader as a turning point, only to be further embroiled in a grinding conflict that destroyed Iraqi society and cost America enormous blood and treasure.
I thought of Bremer’s gleeful declaration as I watched Donald Trump announce on 3 January that US forces had attacked Venezuela and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, whisking him to New York to stand trial on drugs, weapons and “narco-terrorism” charges. Trump didn’t have a pithy quote lined up as Bremer had done, but the president struck a triumphalist tone as he expounded on the US military’s ability to carry out more attacks and warned other Venezuelan leaders that they too could be targeted. “All political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro can happen to them,”