Trump Is Making the Same Mistakes Bush Made in Iraq

1. Violation of the U.N. Charter and the international laws of war

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

The George W. 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 U.N. 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 U.K. 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.”

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 U.S. against U.S. interests. Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl. Tren de Aragua 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 U.N. inspectors, who oversaw the documented destruction of all of Iraq’s chemical and biological and nuclear weapons programs. The revelation, once the U.S. 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 Rodríguez 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 U.S. would run Venezuela for some time. These varying scenarios show that no attention was given to so-called 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 George W. 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 U.S. could go into Iraq, decapitate the regime by killing or capturing Saddam Hussein, and withdraw within six 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 U.S. 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 by both Sunni and Shiite Muslims. 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 Donald Trump spoke Saturday about his plans to have major U.S. petroleum companies reinvigorate the Venezuelan oil industry, which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2017. Administration officials also maintained that Venezuelan petroleum proceeds would pay for the U.S. attack on that country.

The U.S. oil majors for 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. Wolfowitz told Congress in 2003 that Iraqi petroleum would pay for the U.S. invasion of that country. The Bush wars actually cost $5.6 trillion by 2018, including projections of lifetime health care payments through the Department of Veterans Affairs for the thousands of severely wounded veterans. The U.S. national debt is about $37 trillion, while the U.S. gross domestic product is $30 trillion. Without Bush’s fruitless wars (name one benefit you received from them), the U.S. would not be so dangerously indebted, beyond its annual GDP, which economists consider extremely dangerous.

5. Underestimation 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 after the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013 by his successor, 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 George W. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. back in to its 15-year war.