Both Iraq and Venezuela are geo-strategically significant, and targeted by the US due to their huge oil reserves. Bush invaded Iraq in large part due to Iraq’s estimated 145 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Venezuela has 303 billion barrels, more than twice as much, making it the world leader. Whoever controls that oil can not only profit from it, but also offer it to friends and deny it to enemies.
But oil is not the primary issue in either Bush’s 2003 war or Trump’s 2025 re-run. Zionism is.
Maduro’s government, like Saddam Hussein’s in and indeed before 2003, has shown itself more than willing to cut American corporations in on its oil wealth on very favorable terms. But in neither case will the Americans take yes for an answer. Why not? Because both nations—Iraq in 2003 and Venezuela today—were and are committed to maintaining full sovereignty, one of whose expressions is a commitment to the Palestinian resistance struggle against Zionist genocide.
Today, Venezuela is strongly allied with the anti-genocide nations of Iran and Yemen. It maintains political, financial, and logistical ties with Hezbollah. And though Maduro’s Bolivarian government would be happy to strike win-win oil deals with US companies, it reserves the right to maintain a sovereign foreign policy in general, and to ally itself with the Palestinian people in their struggle against Zionist genocide in particular. This is exactly the same position that Saddam Hussein’s government assumed in 2003.
That’s unacceptable to the US, because the US is dominated by a disproportionately Jewish-Zionist billionaire oligarchy that is loyal not to US interests, but to the interests of the genocidal entity occupying Palestine. When an oil-rich, potentially powerful country like Iraq or Venezuela chooses to ally itself with the Palestinian liberation struggle, the Jewish Zionists insist that that country must be destroyed, no matter the cost in blood and treasure.
That’s why Bush and Trump have to lie about the reasons for war. If they told the truth—“the Zionist billionaire crime bosses want to run America into the ground by waging pointlessly destructive wars for Israel”—the American people might be tempted to put an end to that oligarchy, and to the malignant Zionist entity itself.
