Over the past several days, as videos have streamed out of Venezuela showing angry crowds toppling statues of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, I’ve experienced déjà vu more than once. Twenty-one years ago, in Baghdad, I was on hand as a crew of men and boys, assisted by a group of U.S. marines, pulled a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein down from a plinth in the central traffic roundabout known as Firdos Square. It was one of the first-ever actions taken by Iraqis in public defiance of their recently overthrown dictator, who had held power since 1979 and had become their country’s unassailable tyrant, plunging Iraq into several wars that cost hundreds of thousands of human lives. The rest of modern Iraqi history is something many Americans came to know all too well in subsequent years, even if—because of the many U.S. blunders that followed that moment of symbolic triumph—we have mostly chosen to forget it.
To fast forward back to the present, and to Venezuela: the statues of Chávez, the founding father of what he called the “Bolivarian revolution,” after the nineteenth-century Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolívar, are being pulled down by Venezuelans enraged by his successor Nicolás Maduro’s questionable claim of victory in last Sunday’s election. Chávez, who came to power in 1999 and dominated life in the oil-rich nation until he died, of cancer, in 2013, still inhabits an exalted official status by his acolytes, including Maduro, who refer to themselves as Chavistas, and to him as their “supreme commander.” Saddam ruled for a quarter century and was removed from power only by a full-fledged invasion. Although Chávez died after fourteen years in power, the political force he created has continued to dominate Venezuela’s public life, via Maduro, for a similar length of time.
There have been sanctions of various types levied by the United States and its allies against Maduro’s regime, including a multimillion-dollar reward for his arrest for alleged narco-trafficking offenses. Still, as has become commonplace in the history of sanctioned regimes, Venezuela’s has acquired pariah status but it has not fallen, while the vaunted “civic-military pact”—which Chávez engineered with the armed forces, as an essential component of his revolution—has endured and become stronger. The Bolivarian revolution has failed in all of its promises, except for holding on to power, while the regime has become little more than a military dictatorship with a civilian figurehead.
Unlike Chávez, who was a former Army paratrooper, Maduro, a former bus driver and leftist union leader who became........