War in Venezuela, Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq |
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 officials have presented Donald Trump with various game plans for potential operations. The U.S. president is openly tying Nicolás 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 government 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 Case 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 2023 that two decades later, he doesn’t regret supporting the war.
“There are also important 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........