I’ve been watching with quiet horror as the Trump administration sets up all the pieces necessary for a war with Venezuela while the public seems too distracted to care. Washington has created a situation where they can launch an Iraq-invasion-level catastrophe at a moment’s notice and nobody will be able to stop them…and nobody’s trying to stop them either, save Venezuela’s neighbors.
And yet, at least the 2003 Iraq-war clusterfuck saw the Bush administration bending over backwards to sell the public on the war; they tried very hard to make us believe Iraq had nuclear weapons, and that a war would be good for democracy. The Trump administration, by contrast, is barely offering a justification for war with Venezuela; they’re simply making it happen. There was a time when our politicians cared enough to manufacture consent…
But why is this happening? What purpose does war with Venezuela serve? Who benefits? I talked with Jeet Heer, columnist at The Nation and host of The Time of Monsters podcast, to walk through competing hypotheses, who benefits, and the contrasts with the Iraq War.
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