Before Trump’s operation against Nicolás Maduro, Matthew Yglesias had been considering how the invasion of Iraq worked out better than the invasion of Afghanistan:
That’s a bit of a vexing conclusion, because the war in Afghanistan was much better justified. The September 11 terrorist attacks really happened, the Taliban had long been sheltering Al Qaeda, and the United States invaded with broad global support and legitimacy provided by the United Nations. There’s no such thing as a perfect war but, as far as these things go, this one was well-grounded conceptually. It just ended up failing in a pretty profound way, despite a solid casus belli and a perfectly reasonable war aim of “set up a government that is better than the Taliban.”
The point of this, pre-emptively, was going to be to say that just because the burgeoning war with Venezuela was insane and unprovoked didn’t mean it would necessarily be catastrophic.
Trump seems to have been thinking along the same lines because, rather than coming up with any kind of plausible-sounding pretext or legitimate war aims, he appears to have focused on shrinking the mission down so as to maximize the odds of success. Rather than actually changing the regime in Caracas, he decapitated it. He now seems to be simply trying to stabilize the situation under the leadership of a successor group of autocrats who’ll just agree to be more pliable to his demands, which center around seizing a slice of Venezuela’s natural resource wealth.
This is very much not what the Bush administration did in Iraq.
Notably, though, it is something that many of the Bush administration’s left-wing critics said he was doing in Iraq. The war was often portrayed by its opponents as a kind of cynical smash and grab for oil. Trump, meanwhile, has spent years being vocally critical of “neocons,” which led some lefties to see him as a kindred spirit.
But Trump himself has always been clear that he thinks we should have taken Iraq’s oil. In other words, his complaint with Bush is precisely that he thinks the war should have been a cynical smash and grab for oil. And you can see this same line of thinking in other contexts, too. An administration led by a John Bolton or Paul Wolfowitz type would have been very aggressive against Venezuela, but would complement that by being very supportive of Ukraine. The actual Trump policy is to continually back away from supporting Ukraine, but to follow up the Venezuela putsch with new threats to seize Greenland.
Trump is a guy who largely agrees with leftist critiques of the mythos of American power as a force for good in the world and sees military power primarily as a means to imperial extraction. But he thinks that’s good!
Why does Yglesias think the war in Iraq was a success? The current government only exists because Turkish and American troops occupy key areas of the country. The “government” we keep in power would immediately disappear if we left, and it would be replaced by people hostile to us. Even it has repeatedly voted to demand we and the Turks leave. And no one in Iraq, other than the Kurdish radicals recognizes the legitimacy of the Kurdish semiautonomous region. There will be a civil war in Iraq when, or if, we leave.
Yglesias must think Serbia, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Gaza were successes, too.
We are “The Evi Empire,” and our brutal, terrorist reign is coming to and end.
Venezuela and Cuba are hostile regimes acting against the US. Yglesias has no loyalty to the US, so he considers US responses ‘unprovoked’.
That’s not quite «A-anyone who does not accept Franklin Delano Roosevelt as their Lord and Saviour is a leftist!», but not very far.
The space between neocon choir kids and tumblrinas never was a wide uncrossable chasm both of these pretend it is.