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When the Bush administration was planning and selling its war of aggression against Iraq in 2002, a common argument made by anti-war activists was that the whole thing was about oil. By toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, American oil companies could swoop in and make a profit selling cheap oil to Americans so they could keep driving huge SUVs to their suburban McMansions.
This didn’t make all that much sense—for one thing, the war and occupation ended up costing on the order of $3 trillion, and Hussein would have been more than willing to just sell us the oil for a lot less than that—but for an administration whose two top leaders were both former oilmen, it had a surface plausibility.
Donald Trump has done Bush one better: He simply said outright that his military attack on Venezuela, in which commandos kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to Manhattan to be put on trial, was about oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … start making money for the country,” Trump said. Later, he added, “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela … it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused by that country.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration’s architect of Venezuelan regime change, boasted that American refineries were perfectly ready to process the plunder.
There’s just one problem: Stealing Venezuela’s oil makes no sense, even—indeed, especially—from the standpoint of American oil companies.
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