Bush, Iraq, WMD, oil, 2003. Trump, Venezuela, WMD, oil, 2025. The two look eerily similar. From Chuck Baldwin at lewrockwell.com:
The maniacal, Machiavellian, murderous monstrosities of the Trump White House fall upon the world like a monsoon. Small private boats continue to be bombed by Pete Hegseth and the new Department of War Crimes. The Trump-backed gangsters in Tel Aviv continue to slaughter innocent people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. The Trump-backed ISIS head choppers continue to murder Christians and Alawites. And now, in an act of brazen piracy, Trump seizes a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters.
Under the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), piracy and murder are punishable by life in prison or death. And prison is exactly where Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and Admiral Mitch Bradley belong. Then again, that’s where Joe Biden, Barack Obama and G.W. Bush also belong.
If you’ve been following Trump’s build-up for war on Venezuela, and are experiencing feelings of déjà vu—specifically, the uncanny premonition that it’s 2003 all over again—your feelings are fully justified. Like George W. Bush in 2003, Trump is amassing forces off foreign shores in preparation for an invasion of an oil rich sovereign nation. And like his predecessor, Trump is working overtime to sell the war under ludicrously false pretenses.
Like Bush Jr. in 2003, Trump is mendaciously hyperventilating about a nonexistent but terrifying-sounding threat. For Bush, it was mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. For Trump, it’s another kind of alleged “chemical weapon”: fentanyl. In both cases, the link between the planned US invasion and the pretext is purely imaginary.
There was never any credible evidence that the relatively stable, prosperous, but sanctions-crippled pre-2003 Iraq possessed an arsenal of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. That story was pure propaganda, the product of overheated neoconservative imaginations. The neocons knew that to stampede the public into war, they needed to invent a terrifying big lie. “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” Bush famously intoned. In other words, who needs proof? Who needs evidence? Let’s just launch a huge war, slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, and ruin a whole nation, based on preposterous accusations backed up by nothing at all.
