Manufacturing Consent: Resurrecting the Iraq Playbook in Venezuela

A few weeks before Christmas, I quietly wrote a piece for a student publication exploring Trump’s continuation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine through his rampant interventions in America’s so-called backyard. In light of recent kidnappings, I suppose I should have bought a lottery ticket too. 

Trump had been pushing the limits in Venezuela for a while. On December 10^th, the US seized a crude oil tanker, which Trump claimed was being used to transport oil between Iran and Venezuela. After months of escalation and ambiguous threats over Maduro’s alleged involvement in shipping drugs to the US, a military buildup had been established in the Caribbean. The US then attacked a series of Venezuelan boats with missiles, the legality of which is still in question. The justification for the attacks relied on Maduro’s alleged membership of Cartel de los Soles, a US-designated terrorist group involved in drug trafficking. Maduro strenuously denies being part of any cartel, although in practice, many groups implicated in drug smuggling are less a hierarchical organisation and more a loosely connected network of corruption.

And then, a second justification started to crop up in reports. Trump alleged that Maduro was using oil money to finance “drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping”. These allegations attempted to justify further missile attacks against small boats accused of drug trafficking, killing over 100 people. The US has failed to present evidence against these individuals, with their families and the Venezuelan government claiming that they were fishermen. Regardless, oil started to dominate the story, abandoning the need for detail or clarification. Baselessly, Trump credited the US with establishing an oil industry in Venezuela that the state then “stole by force”. Without shame, Trump now claims that “our very large United States oil companies” will “spend billions of dollars” in Venezuela.

Little has emerged since the abduction of Maduro on how Trump will disrupt and combat the alleged existential threat of drug trafficking – the priorities have shifted, or simply become more transparent. Trump’s recent pardoning of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking, exposes his hypocrisy. Drugs were just as easily securitised as a threat to the livelihood of US citizens as WMDs were in Iraq. The US playbook on generating a pretext for invasion to permit the piratical looting of a nation’s natural resources is as old as time. And the cartoon villain, the big bad dictator with an arsenal of weapons and a burning hatred for democracy, was just as easy to find in Nicolás Maduro as it was in Saddam Hussein. 

The playbook is being resurrected elsewhere, too. Already, social media is flooded with images and videos of Venezuelans celebrating in the streets of Caracas, waving flags and dancing in jubilation. Except they aren’t. A video showing celebrations, posted by notorious grifter and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has been found by the BBC to actually show opposition protests in Caracas in 2024, after Maduro’s disputed election win. Similarly, a whole host of other misleading videos have been debunked as occurring in Chile or Argentina, or in areas with sizeable Venezuelan diaspora such as the US. AI manipulated imagery is also rampant. 

The people of Venezuela are, of course, far from a jubilant crowd welcoming American liberators. Indeed, few countries would welcome US “liberation” in light of what usually follows. There have been no large-scale celebrations in Venezuela, and the human consequences of the invasion campaign are as yet unknown. Nevertheless, the powers that be have set about manufacturing consent for this flagrant breach of international law.

US Democrats predictably condemned the invasion with their usual tepid vigour. Many have found themselves caught in the trap of having previously called for a harsher stance on Venezuela, not least former President Biden, who alleged in 2020 that Trump “admires” Maduro. Critics have also pointed out that the Biden Administration also seemed keen on the removal of the Maduro regime. Former VP Kamala Harris wrote on X, “That Maduro is a brutal, illegitimate dictator does not change the fact that this action was both unlawful and unwise.”  Had Putin abducted Zelenskyy, Harris surely would’ve found stronger reproach. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been reluctant to condemn the violation of international law, claiming he is choosing his words ‘wisely’. Similar criticism can easily be levelled against him.

Alleged concern with legality and court procedure falls a little flat when the sitting US President is convicted of 34 felony crimes and has attempted a coup in recent memory, but alas. Some might even argue that Maduro and Trump have more in common than apart in character. It is important that the endless posturing and moral superiority are understood as what they are – a front. The United States’ quest for oil and influence knows no limits, and this is simply its latest iteration. Whether the legacy of Trump’s latest move is a full-scale invasion or, more likely, decades of political instability and financial dependence, the damage has been done. The entire US political establishment bears some responsibility for its normalisation of unrestricted military action.

Illustrations: Will Allen/Europinion