Last month, the U.S. Coast Guard rappelled from a helicopter onto the deck of the Centuries, an oil tanker that had last left port in Venezuela. It was the second Venezuelan-linked tanker detained by U.S. forces in the Caribbean in December, while a third tanker was sought by the U.S Coast Guard.
The seizures were framed as routine enforcement of sanctions. But to many observers, they looked like something else: a crude show of force that revived uncomfortable memories of how easily oil, security, and moral justification blur when Washington wants war.
As the Trump administration escalates its pressure campaign against Venezuela, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only lessons America absorbed from its catastrophic invasion of Iraq were the wrong ones.
The White House's deadliest error is its indulgence in motivated reasoning. Like the Bush administration before it, Trump's administration is seemingly placing his enthusiasm for toppling a dictator over facts or strategic planning.
The administration recently labelled fentanyl a chemical "weapon of mass destruction" -- echoing the falsehood that George W. Bush used to drag the U.S. into Iraq in 2003. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since accused Nicolás Maduro of working with "narco-traffickers and narco-terrorists" -- reviving memories of George W. Bush's unfounded obsession with an alliance between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
This rhetoric comes amid allegations of human rights violations over the administration's drone campaign against alleged drug trafficking boats from Venezuela. Last month, Trump said he was not ruling out war. It is tempting to conclude that our leaders learned nothing from Iraq. The truth is darker. They learned that exaggeration, fearmongering, and the fabrication of existential threats can still work.
Now that cynical logic is being aimed at a neighbor in the Americas. Latin America is no stranger to Washington's interventions, but recycling the rhetorical playbook of the most catastrophic blunder in modern U.S. history signals to the region -- and to the world -- that America remains unable, or unwilling, to control its worst instincts.
Political memory is short, but the costs of the Iraq War were enormous. While the initial invasion was swift and militarily successful, what followed was nearly a decade of violent counterinsurgency, in which more than 4,400 American servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed -- mainly civilians.
Yet the lesson U.S. leaders appear to have drawn is not that wars like Iraq should be rare, limited and meticulously planned. Instead, they learned that no administration remains in power forever, and that a president can claim the initial victory while leaving the eventual reckoning to a successor.
In Iraq, shamefully little attention was paid to planning for what came beyond President George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech in 2003. The dismantling of the Iraqi state created power vacuums that spawned and nurtured extremist pro-Saddam militias, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and eventually ISIS.
The deeper lesson was not merely that invasion breeds instability, but that ungoverned spaces accelerate extremist ideology and transnational violence.
The same dynamic could unfold in Venezuela. Latin America has a long history of insurgency, from FARC in Colombia, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and the Shining Path in Peru. Just as disbanded Ba'athist forces gravitated towards militias and terror groups after 2004, fractured Venezuelan security forces could easily be absorbed into criminal-terrorist ecosystems that already exist. Under Maduro, Venezuela has worked with Colombian guerrilla groups and illicit trafficking networks while cultivating ties with Hezbollah.
Venezuela presents some risks even greater than Iraq. The Maduro regime is recruiting and arming militias and preparing troops for a guerrilla war.
When Iraq collapsed and the army disbanded, al-Qaeda wasted little time in recruiting newly unemployed soldiers. It is in this space that organizations such as the Muslim World League have sought to intervene globally -- not as security actors, but as religious authorities capable of challenging extremist narratives at their root.
Under the leadership of its Secretary-General, Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, the Muslim World League has focused on stripping violent movements of religious legitimacy by building cross-sectarian consensus against the politicization of faith. Its 2019 Charter of Makkah -- endorsed by more than 1,200 Sunni, Shia, and minority-sect scholars from 139 countries -- explicitly rejects religious supremacy, sectarian violence, and the use of theology to justify terror. That effort reflects lessons drawn from conflicts like Iraq, where the collapse of state authority was compounded by the absence of a shared moral framework capable of resisting extremist capture.
Venezuela lacks an equivalent religious or institutional counterweight. An intervention would risk repeating Iraq's gravest mistake: tearing down a state in an environment already primed for extremist and criminal consolidation.
The cautionary lessons that should have restrained American power are instead being rewritten as a playbook for war. The administration is selling the illusion of strength for short-term political gain, at the cost of American credibility, stability and lives.
Iraq should have ended this way of thinking. Venezuela suggests it never did.
Paulina Velasco is chief of staff for the Los Angeles City Council and a Democratic political strategist. She is also a journalist who has been published in The Hill, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), and Dallas Morning News, among others.