In 2010, I wrote a book called War Is A Lie, with an updated edition in 2016. If I'm lucky and find time -- and maybe if they ease up on the wars for a little while -- I'll get a new version out in 2026. But I can already apply the basic idea of the book to the threatened war on Venezuela.
The argument in the book is, of course, not that wars aren't real, but rather that nothing that is commonly said to justify them is true. The book begins thus:
"Not a single thing that we commonly believe about wars that helps keep them around is true. Wars cannot be good or glorious. Nor can they be justified as a means of achieving peace or anything else of value. The reasons given for wars, before, during, and after them (often three very different sets of reasons for the same war), are all false. It is common to imagine that, because we'd never go to war without a good reason, having gone to war, we simply must have a good reason. This needs to be reversed. Because there can be no good reason for war, having gone to war, we are participating in a lie."
If the U.S. launches a newly escalated war against Venezuela, and someday it ends, the war may turn out to have been a futile attempt to bring democracy to the ungrateful and incapable people of Venezuela who, we will be told, simply didn't want it. Or -- this being Trump bizarro land, with honesty bursting out in odd moments -- perhaps we'll just be told that the war was a theft of oil. If Russia has ultimately joined the war (the worst is always possible), then of course Russia will have started it -- if anyone is left alive to care. But that's all for an unpredictable future.
Before the end of the war, if an indefinite occupation develops because Venezuela shockingly behaves like every other invaded place on Earth ever and fights back, then until that occupation ends, the reasons to keep the war going may include the solemn need to get more U.S. troops killed in support of those already killed, or various tales about drugs and democracy, or (if a Democrat has ascended the throne in the Trump Ballroom) the Rules Based Order, or (if one hasn't) perhaps just old-is-new-again straight-up racism. But that's all for after a new war has been started.
What about the things we are being told right now to try to get a war started (which will likely mostly be forgotten in the future)? Well, first of all, what we're being told is not working. Polling shows the U.S. public strongly opposed to a war on Venezuela. That fact will vanish from future tellings whether the war happens or not. Consider, though, what it says about the need to bring democracy to Venezuela through a war opposed by the people whose government is launching it. To make sense of the term "democracy" in U.S. foreign policy, it simply has to be understood as "U.S. power."
There have been misleading polls finding majority support for blowing up boats supposedly full of drugs and arrived in the United States with those drugs. Those polls have been used to provide cover for murdering everyone aboard boats that were actually found over a thousand miles away from the United States. In propaganda terms, the purpose of murdering those boatloads of people has perhaps included the unsuccessful effort to gain support for a wider war, but has certainly included the successful effort to get all decent people to focus on asking and answering the wrong questions.
Murder is illegal. War is illegal. Threatening war is illegal. These basic facts are obscured when the question becomes "Does Iraq have WMDs?" or -- in this case -- questions like these:
- "Is blowing up boats part of a war?" or
- "Does the drug cartel invented by the CIA really exist?" or
- "What obscure arguments have Trump's lawyers used to make the murders part of a war and therefore legal (even though war is not legal) while at the same time making those murders neither part of a war nor even hostile so that the War Powers Resolution does not apply?"
We do not need to dignify such questions with our attention.
Murder is illegal whether or not part of a war. It would be illegal even if Congress were to pass a resolution against it. It is illegal even though the Senate has voted down a resolution against it, and even though House Speaker Mike Johnson is illegally refusing to hold a vote. The exceptionally blatant illegality of attacking Venezuela, even in the eyes of many supporters of militarism in general, is likely why the head of Southern Command quit last month. The growing discussion of the responsibility to disobey illegal orders is not unrelated to this threatened war. The UK has reportedly stopped sharing information with the United States that could be used to facilitate this war. Imagine how far over the line you have to be for that to have happened.
A New York Times columnist tells us that the United States should overthrow the Venezuelan government because it is allied with enemies of the United States and because it is cruel to the Venezuelan public. Either of these arguments would allow almost any country to attack various other countries. The notion that Russia, China, and Iran -- either separately or together -- are trying to gain a "foothold" in a part of the world properly belonging to the United States from which to launch their attack on Washington may be an embarrassingly absurd projection, but even if it were plausible, it wouldn't justify attacking Venezuela and driving most of the rest of Latin America into closer alliances with those designated enemies. The illegal U.S. sanctions that have been killing large numbers of Venezuelans are of course at the root of much of the suffering for which U.S. columnists like to blame the Venezuelan government.
In years gone by, the Nobel Peace Prize went a couple of times to Iranian opponents of the Iranian government as it was in the crosshairs of the Pentagon, but those laureates would criticize the Iranian government and quickly make clear that they didn't want their country bombed, as that would be even worse. This year, the prize went to a Venezuelan who wants her country starved and invaded. This is used to generate the lie that Venezuelans are willing to be attacked in order to free them from their government. If you are tempted to believe such madness, think about how frustrated you are with the U.S. government, and then ask yourself whether you'd like your house bombed.
Of course the notion of "overthrow" is supposed to suggest something quick and easy, an operation during which most people's houses are spared. But quick and easy usually turns into endless and catastrophic. It's a tragedy that the Iraq Syndrome is wearing off, that people are forgetting how actual wars relate to pre-war sales pitches. Coups tend not to be followed by peace so much as by endless killing and destruction.
It's worth bearing in mind that overthrowing a government is a crime, and the opposite of law enforcement, because we have also been hearing a lot about those murdered being criminals. Trump recently suggested that it was all right for Saudi Arabia to murder a U.S. journalist because the journalist was "controversial." Wars tend to be marketed with a stronger claim than that, namely one of criminality.
More than that, wars are usually marketed as a defense against aggression by the other side. The Venezuelan government has no difficulty marketing its side of the looming war in those terms. Trump, on the other hand, has to sell this war as a defense against an "invasion" by drug dealers or simply by the wrong sort of people. But that's not a simple sell, possibly not even to the most sadistic "tough-on-crime" racist xenophobe, because speaking Spanish or even selling drugs is not exactly the same as mass murder and destruction, as well as because Venezuelan immigrants are mostly fleeing U.S. sanctions, a war will cause a huge increase in immigration, and the Venezuelan children blown to pieces in this "defensive" war will be seen on social media -- horrors that will seem to virtually everyone worse than speaking with an accent. Simply labeling an imaginary drug cartel as a "terrorist" organization -- in an act that actually terrifies people in Venezuela -- lacks substance and imagery.
Hard as that sell is, the war pitch to contemporary liberal war fans usually goes even further than that. Usually a claim is made that each war is a last resort, that everything other than war has been exhaustively attempted first. This is always a nonsensical claim, as there are always more things to try, but Trump's long buildup works against him here, since he hasn't been trying anything other than threatening war, and even a child could tell you that all he would need to do to avoid the war he is threatening is to not wage it.
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