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TOP 5 MISTAKES BUSH MADE IN IRAQ THAT TRUMP IS MAKING IN VENEZUELA  
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Juan Cole
January 4, 2026
Informed Comment
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_ Violate the UN Charter and the laws of war. Create false pretexts.
Make no plans for the day after. Fantasize about seizing another
country's oil wealth. Under-estimate the potential for
destabilization. Lessons not learned are mistakes repeated. _

Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela (l) and Saddam Hussein of Iraq (r),
Public Domain photographs

 

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –

1. VIOLATION OF THE UN CHARTER AND THE INTERNATIONAL LAWS OF WAR

The Trump administration attacked Venezuela and abducted dictator
Nicolas Maduro without the slightest justification in international
law. The UN Charter forbids war except under two circumstances,
self-defense or the designation of a country as a danger to
international order by the UN Security Council. Venezuela had not
militarily attacked the US. The UNSC had not called for international
action against Maduro. This situation differs from that in Libya in
2011, when the UNSC did designate Moammar Gaddafi a war criminal and
authorized military action against his regime.

The Bush administration attacked Iraq in 2003 without any foundation
in international law. Iraq had not attacked the United States in the
decade leading up to the American intervention. The UN Security
Council, led by France, Russia and China, specifically declined to
authorize the invasion. Whereas George H. W. Bush’s campaign to push
Iraq back out of Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991 was successful because
of substantial international buy-in, Bush’s inability to secure
significant support from any countries but the UK and Spain harmed his
effort in Iraq and contributed to its failure. I analyzed the failures
of Bush’s wars in my Engaging the Muslim World.
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2. FALSE PRETEXTS.

The Trump administration charged Maduro with smuggling fentanyl to the
United States and with overtly deploying the alleged Tren de Aragua
cartel inside the US against U.S. interests. Venezuela is not a source
of fentanyl. Tren de Aragua
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was a small prison gang that engaged in some criminality on the
outside. It was dismantled in 2019. It has no known significant
presence in the United States and certainly isn’t a state
instrument, if it could be said to exist at all.

The Bush administration alleged that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had an
active nuclear weapons program and was two years away from blowing up
a nuke. Iraq had had a small nuclear program in the 1980s but it was
never very successful. It was dismantled after the Gulf War by UN
inspectors, who oversaw the documented destruction of all Iraq’s
chemical and biological and nuclear weapons programs. The revelation,
once the US had occupied Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass
destruction (a propaganda term) in that country fatally damaged the
legitimacy of the Bush project and made the administration a
laughingstock.

3. NO PLAN FOR THE NEXT DAY

The Trump administration appears to have had made no plans for the day
after. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said that the
operation was over once Maduro was abducted, implying that the
Bolivarian government would remain in place and that Vice President
Delcy Rodriguez would succeed Maduro. But the Venezuelan opposition
suggested that Maduro’s opponent in the disputed 2024 election,
Edmundo González, should take over. Trump himself said that the US
would run Venezuela for some time. These varying scenarios show that
no attention was given to Phase 4 (post-military-conflict civilian
governance) issues. These issues are still not settled, which is sort
of like trying to make a movie without a finished script. It doesn’t
end well.

In the Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were opposed to Phase 4
planning. They were convinced that the US could go into Iraq,
decapitate the regime by killing or capturing Saddam Hussein, and
withdraw within 6 months. Their opposition to a long-term occupation
derived from familiarity with the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the
Palestinian West Bank, which even then was obviously a slow-motion
train wreck. In contrast, Secretary of State Colin Powell and many
officials at the State Department were convinced that the US would
have to run Iraq for at least two years after the invasion. Rumsfeld
had Bush’s ear and sidelined the State Department, refusing to allow
Tom Warrick, who had run a two-year seminar at State on post-war
governance needs in Iraq, to go to Iraq. The lack of planning for
Phase 4 allowed the outbreak of widespread looting in Iraq and the
inception of anti-American guerrilla struggles both by Sunnis and by
Shiites. Once those movements began they proved impossible ever truly
to squelch, and by 2006 the country was in civil war.

4. THE OIL FACTOR.

President Trump spoke Saturday about his plans to have US petroleum
majors reinvigorate the Venezuelan oil industry, which has been under
US sanctions since 2017. Administration officials also maintained that
Venezuelan petroleum proceeds would pay for the US attack on that
country.

The US oil majors for long years showed little interest in Iraqi
petroleum even after the invasion, since the Iraqi government set
unfavorable bid terms. China was therefore initially the chief foreign
beneficiary of the removal of sanctions on Iraqi petroleum. Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in 2003 that Iraqi
petroleum would pay for the US invasion of that country. The Bush wars
actually cost $5.6 trillion by 2018, including projections of lifetime
health care payments through the VA for the thousands of severely
wounded veterans. The US national debt is about $37 trillion, while
the US GDP is $30 trillion. Without Bush’s fruitless wars (name one
benefit you received from them), the US would not be so dangerously
indebted, beyond its annual GDP, which economists consider extremely
dangerous.

5. UNDER-ESTIMATION OF POLARIZATION AND POTENTIAL FOR DESTABILIZATION.

Venezuela is an extremely polarized society. The divisions between the
poor in city barrios and the old business classes may have been
reconfigured
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after the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013 by his successor Nicolas
Maduro. But under Maduro poverty soared and some 8 million Venezuelans
fled the country. Since Americans are trained not to analyze using
social class and are encouraged to focus on personalities and horse
races instead, they are at a disadvantage in understanding the social
fissures in other societies. Maduro had shifted his political base
from the poor to sections of the business classes, and while that
meant that after the stolen 2024 election the barrios demonstrated
against him just as did the upscale Caracas neighborhoods, his removal
could reopen the question of division of society’s goods — a
question that led to Chavez’s rise in the first place. Class
conflict is real in Venezuela, and a political vacuum could unleash
it.

The Bush administration likewise underestimated the polarization of
Iraqi society. Some of the divisions were sectarian, between Sunnis
and Shiites. Others were class-based. Thus, the urban poor mobilized
behind fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who formed the Mahdi Army militia
that engaged in battles with the US Marines. Secular urban Sunnis and
fundamentalist Sunnis from small towns formed some 60 major guerrilla
groups that sniped at and set improvised explosive devices for US
troops. Bush created 75% unemployment in Sunni areas while putting the
former underclass, the Shiites, in power. By 2014 the extremist
hyper-Sunni group ISIL was able to detach 40% of Iraqi territory from
the country and to engage in massacres of Shiites, drawing the US back
in to its 15-year war.

_JUAN COLE_ [[link removed]]_ is the founder
and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell
Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the
University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books,
__Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires_
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and __The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_
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Follow him on Twitter at __@jricole_
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or the __Informed Comment Facebook Page_
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_Informed Comment_ [[link removed]]_ sheds light on how war,
climate change and globalization are shaping our world. Drawing on the
insights of expert journalists, activists, and academics, we strive to
publish deep geopolitical analysis that’s readable for a general
audience. And unlike most foreign policy-oriented publications, our
editorial line isn’t dictated by beltway think tanks or corporate
boards._

 

* Venezuela
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* Donald Trump
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* Nicolas Maduro
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* Saddam Hussein
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* Iraq War
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