You won’t be surprised that Donald J. Trump doesn’t know the early history of the Iraq War (or really any wars at any time). After all, this is the president who took credit for ending a war between Azerbaijan and Albania. These two countries, which are located 1,800 miles apart, were, unsurprisingly, never at war.
It’s too bad he doesn’t, because Trump’s attempts to launch a war for oil in Venezuela is probably going to end at least as badly as the Iraq War. That’s because I fear that media darling and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado Parisca may end up being the South American Ahmad Chalabi.
Sure, President Bush Junior may well have seen the Iraq War as a solution to his daddy issues (although he denies it). Even so, let us not forget how eager the military-industrial complex and Big Oil were to take over Iraq.
But if U.S. imperialists know one thing, it’s that you have to replace the leader you’re toppling with someone compliant. Their man for the job was Ahmed Chalabi, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. The man the neocons called “the George Washington of Iraq“ was actually the Enron’s Jeff Skilling of the Middle East. In the one of several bank failures, Chalabi fled Jordan to avoid serving a 22-year prison sentence for embezzlement in connection with the failed Petra Bank. Chalabi was also tied to banks that failed amidst embezzlement accusations in Lebanon and Switzerland.
Unsurprisingly, Iraqis weren’t interested in having a habitual bank embezzler as president. A 2004 poll showed Chalabi as the least trusted politician in Iraq. Can’t imagine why!
But Chalabi was an MIT graduate with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, charming, well mannered, and fluent in English. He had friends in high places, particularly Paul Wolfowitz, who would become Deputy Defense Secretary. As recently as 2014, two years before Chalabi’s death, Wolfowitz was still arguing for Chalabi to be made the leader of Iraq. I couldn’t make this up!
So regardless of Iraqi sentiment or even common sense, the Bush Administration foisted Chalabi onto the Iraqi Governing Council and appointed Chalabi relatives and minions to important government ministries. Soon thereafter Chalabi was charged in Iraq with counterfeiting by a judge appointed by the Americans. Where was Chalabi at the time? Why, vacationing in Iran! And no wonder, as intelligence officers were saying by mid-2004 that Chalabi was passing secrets to the Iranians. By 2006, Chalabi was primarily living in London’s Mayfair. I don’t have to tell you how big an albatross Iraq became for the United States.
Former CIA analyst and author Kenneth Pollack best summarized Chalabi’s role with the Bush Administrations:
… I think that Chalabi was convenient for them. If there had been no Ahmad Chalabi, the Bush administration would have had to invent him. I suspect they would have tried to build someone else up to play that role — Ayad Allawi perhaps, or Sharif Ali, the pretender to the throne. That person might have accepted the role, but he would not have played it as enthusiastically or heedlessly as Ahmad. Ahmad was hugely convenient for the Bush administration because he wanted to play that role and would play it to the hilt. But I don’t think that absent Ahmad Chalabi the Bush administration would have refrained from invading Iraq.
Imperialists — and what else can you call a gaggle that wants to take over a country in order to exploit its resources to the detriment of its citizens? — saw in Chalabi a man who had proven to lack scruples, just the kind of fellow they wanted as a yes man in Iraq.
Now let’s take a look at María Corina Machado Parisca. An industrial engineer, Machado comes from a famous, wealthy, conservative Venezuelan family, educated at a boarding school in Wellesley, Mass., vacationed in Europe, and is fluent in English. In fairness, unlike Chalabi, Machado hasn’t been a crook, and she has shown a great deal of courage. But is Yale fellow Machado the ideal leader for a country that had a 50% poverty rate the year Hugo Chávez was first elected? And while no one likes to bring it up, Machado entered the wider political scene as part of an organization called Súmate, which accused the 2004 referendum of being rigged, even though international observers agreed that Chávez won easily. If this sounds like Trump in 2020 to you, it does to me, too. Two years earlier, Machado celebrated the coup against Chávez, an odd thing for anyone who claims to be committed to democracy to do.
Like the Bush Administration with regard to actual Iraqis, neither the Trump Administration nor Machado have asked themselves why the slums of Caracas remain solidly pro-Chavismo. What doesn’t come up in Machado’s accolades in the wake of her Nobel Prize win is that Machado is, in essence, a far-right politician, in favor of privatizing the national oil company and of returning expropriated land to the wealthy landowners from the farm workers they exploited for centuries.
Indeed, Spain’s prestigious El Pais describes Machado as “from the most radical wing of the right” (article in English). The party Machado founded in 2012, Vente Venezuela, proclaims in its by-laws (in Spanish) its support for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and the family. Sounds an awful lot like the pre-Trump GOP. In other words, the very kind of party that led to Chavismo in the first place. Don’t take my word for it: “Her vision of government is similar to what Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan had in mind,” wrote Inés Santaeulalia and Alonso Moleiro in El País just before the 2023 Venezuelan opposition primary.
Now, one can argue that Machado, in urging the invasion of her country to “liberate” it, is simply being a latter-day Charles de Gaulle. But somehow this fiery champion of justice doesn’t have anything to say about innocent Venezuelan fishermen being blown out of the water in an attempt to provoke that war. After the American invasion, when, like Chalabi, Machado is elevated to lead Venezuela, Big Oil, Big Ag, and lots of American companies are sure to get what they want. But will everyday Venezuelans end up ignored like these fishermen?
In Iraq, everyone hated Sadaam Hussein; it didn’t mean they liked Ahmad Chalabi. In that new Venezuela, I wonder if Venezuelans will admire Machado as much as the Nobel Committee did. And I also wonder if what de facto president Stephen Miller sees as an easy war for oil in South America will turn out to be another decades-long military quagmire in a country Americans (especially Trump) could not point to on a map.
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