Iraq 2.0: Venezuela

The renewed escalation toward U.S. military intervention in Venezuela feels less like a fresh strategy of conflict and more like a tragic reprise of a script Washington never learned to stop performing, throughout the many years of the "war on terror." Official statements frame the buildup of warships and surveillance aircraft in the Caribbean as "counter-narcotics operations," yet this framing collapses under scrutiny. The United States is massing significant military power offshore, while the administration leans on rhetorical devices like "narco-terrorism" to cast Nicolás Maduro as a global menace, precisely the kind of elastic threat label that has historically smoothed America's path to war.

What makes this moment so chilling is how directly it echoes the flawed assumptions that led the United States into Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II findings established that the Bush administration "repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent". Those conclusions, once dismissed as partisan, are now part of the historical record. The Committee determined that the most alarming judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate were "overstated or unsupported," an indictment of the threat-inflation that became the foundation for war. To watch the same architecture of narrative-building re-emerge around Venezuela, claims of hidden criminal networks, global terror linkages, and emergency powers, is to witness history attempting, once again, to repeat its darkest mistakes.

And just as in 2002, the media ecosystem is already softening the ground. During the Iraq buildup, major outlets amplified administration claims in the name of sober expertise. The New York Times itself eventually conceded its coverage "wasn't as rigorous as it should have been," acknowledging that it gave disproportionate weight to officials eager to make the case for invasion. Today's early Venezuela coverage is beginning to trace similar patterns to what we saw earlier: presenting naval deployments as routine, accepting "limited strike" language at face value, and framing escalation as a technocratic calibration rather than a pivot toward open conflict.

Those who claim Venezuela is "different" often point to narrow military objectives or insist that the United States is not seeking regime change. But foreign policy experts warn that this belief in controlled outcomes is a fantasy. As the Stimson Center cautions, "a war in Venezuela would not solve Latin America's drug or dictator problems" and would instead trigger cascading instability across an already fragile region. These assessments are not ideological; they are warnings from institutions familiar with the contours of failed interventions.

The legal justification for escalation also mirrors wars in the Middle East. The Bush administration relied on overbroad interpretations of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, stretching its reach far beyond any reasonable intent. Now, the Venezuela narrative is being routed through a similar loophole: reclassifying geopolitical confrontation as "counter-narcotics" enforcement. The U.S. has a long pattern of waging war "based on false and overstated intelligence" and dressing exceptional violence in the language of technical necessity.

The conviction that America can topple governments and manage the aftermath has been disproven repeatedly. Iraq's collapse into sectarian violence was not the product of bad luck but of a fundamental misreading of power vacuums and post-regime realities; U.S. planners assume that political institutions would endure the shock of intervention, or just simply don't care. Instead, they crumble. Venezuela, already grappling with economic crisis, mass migration, and eroded infrastructure, is even less equipped to absorb such a blow. Intervention would not create stability; it would detonate what remains of the state.

And yet, despite two decades of empirical evidence, Washington continues to treat war as a manageable instrument. As tensions rise in the Caribbean, commentators are already recycling the language of "limited strikes" and "measured responses," the same euphemisms that obscured the real magnitude of the Iraq invasion until it was irreversible. Any U.S. miscalculation, a naval confrontation, an armed retaliation, or a misidentified target could rapidly escalate a regional standoff into a full-spectrum conflict.

The lesson Iraq left us, taught in blood, debt, and global distrust, was that war is never as clean, controlled, or righteous as its architects promise. Venezuela is not an exception. It is a warning. And if the United States once again confuses military coercion for political wisdom, the next generation will inherit the consequences, just as this one inherited the ghosts of Baghdad. The real question is not whether we can stop another misguided war. It is whether we are willing to learn from the last one before it is too late.

— Omar Dahabra