When I tuned in to an NFL game last night, the pre-game ritual that attends every big sports event was underway. Someone sang the Star Spangled Banner, a huge flag was unfurled, fans stood with hands over their hearts. I don’t remember if jet fighters flew over the stadium. To most, it’s a show of patriotism. To me, it’s a symbol of American jingoism. And, at this point in our history, this country epitomizes jingoism. 

 

Hours earlier about 2,720 miles to the south, real American jingoism was playing out in Venezuela. Our absurd Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, ordered a team of elite Army Delta Force commandos into the country to kidnap dictator-alleged narco lord Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bring them to New York City to be tried. Venezuela will be “run” — Trump’s word — by the U.S. indefinitely. “Indefinitely” means until the Trump administration can get the flow of Venezuelan oil into the hands of American companies.

 

So here we go again: Another foreign invasion to overthrow a corrupt  government, this time on the pretext of stopping illegal drugs from coming into our country, but actually to get access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.   

 

Does anyone remember Iraq? After the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S., a coterie of rich businessmen surrounding then-president George W. Bush came up with an idea: Cook up some reason, any reason, to overthrow Iraq’s hated dictator Saddam Hussein, then occupy the country and control its oil reserves. Americans voters, clamoring for payback after 9/11, wouldn’t quibble about the fact that Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11. The ploy worked. At the cost of the lives of a few thousand U.S. and allied soldiers (we didn’t yet call them warriors) and a few hundred thousand Iraqis, the oil and gas cronies made a fortune as did their kissing cousins, oil services companies like Halliburton. So did arms manufacturers that feed at the Pentagon trough. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would never have to pay for a drink at the Oil and Gas Club bar again. Everyone won!

 

Fast forward 22 years. Americans who once understood the tragedy and infamy of our invasion of Iraq shoved it to the back of their minds and went back to life in the greatest country in the history of the world. So when a real dictator whose kleptocratic skills match Saddam Hussein’s was elected president for a second term, he began working us like clay in his hands, telling us the regime of Maduro and Co. was responsible for our country’s drug epidemic. We didn’t see the red herring, just like we didn’t see Dubya’s WMDs as the phony baloney they turned out to be. 

 

So our dictator’s designs on Venezuelan oil moved into the next phase, with attacks on Venezuelan speedboats allegedly loaded with drugs headed to the U.S.  The attacks were spectacular — explosions that hurled debris and bodies into the air. Our dictator made sure the videos were  shared with the news media. They proved that Venezuela was killing Americans with drugs, he said. A few people questioned the legality of the attacks and summary executions of people who weren’t tried or convicted of any crime. Our dictator waved such questions away and ordered his gunboats to keep shooting. Public outrage over the attacks, shamefully mild as it was, died down.

 

The realization that he’d literally gotten away with murder emboldened our dictator. Next he seized huge oil tankers operating off the Venezuelan coast, then went for the ultimate prize — kidnapping its unpopular president and taking over the country. No one feels sorry for Maduro any more than they did for Saddam Hussein. Americans were assured that we would not colonize Venezuela; we’ll only “run  it” until a democratically elected  government is assembled. 

 

What irony: America, which has allowed its democratic norms and institutions to slip away under our dictator, is preaching democracy to Venezuela.

 

Meanwhile, come on down, Chevron, and start making money again. Trump takes a page out of Dubya’s  playbook and, because of our amnesia and ignorance, he will get away with it. He is hero No. 1 to the oil and gas billionaires and their bankers. (At this writing, Chevron’s stock is sharply up in pre-market trading.) 

 

More than 50 years ago,  as a Latin American Studies major at Tulane,  I learned about the history of our interventions into Latin American politics — from Cuba (Remember the Maine!), to Haiti, to Nicaragua, to all the Central American republics, to Grenada, to CIA support of murderers like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Our attempts to shape the history of Latin America for the benefit of American business interests is almost uniformly shameful. (Yes, capitalism was the engine driving our Latin American policies.)  We intervened to protect or generate profits for U.S. corporations. That’s it. We are not democratizing, we are not reforming. We are the bullies of the region and capitalism, not idealism, propels us. We are, in short, the bad guys.  Our invasion of Venezuela fits neatly with that history. I find that sickening. 

 

When Trump formally announced the invasion from his gilded castle in Palm Beach, he was flanked by several men. Two deserve comment. Marco Rubio, our secretary of state, is an unashamed Trump ass-kisser who is obsessed with one country in Latin America — Cuba. He is from South Florida and is heavily influenced by some of the most right-wing, anti-Communist zealots anywhere, the Cuban exile community. Because Venezuela has been an ally to Cuba and helped Cuba with oil, Rubio developed an intense dislike for  the Maduro regime. So our secretary of state sees Venezuela as one more case of good vs. evil, communism vs. freedom that he learned to love during the Cold War. He is either unwilling or unable to see any gray area in the  situation. 

 

The other person I must mention is the hyper-macho former Fox News personality who is now our secretary of defense. The Iraq 2.0 that the Trump mafia put together for Venezuela is a wet dream for Pete Hegseth. He gets to play soldier. Watch him send battleships into the Caribbean. Watch him deploy 15,000 soldiers, Marines and sailors. What machismo! So in charge! And, as a special bonus, he gets to go on TV and talk about things like his Department of War, the Gulf of America, his warriors, overwhelming lethality and so on. What a man’s man! The icing on the cake for Hegseth was something he’s long dreamed of — deploying the Delta Force to kidnap Maduro and take out anyone who got in the way. That must have taken a lot of courage. 

 

These two men typify the ignorance and absurdity of the Trump regime. They are too ignorant of history to hesitate even for a second to invade a Latin American country. Their egos insulate them from any second thoughts about their roles in this misadventure. They are the kind of men our dictator surrounds himself with. And the Republican Party has gladly let Trump give them key Cabinet jobs. By doing so, Republicans have aided and abetted Trump’s transformation of America into what for the foreseeable future is a rogue nation. 

 

And we may not have hit bottom yet. Greenland, Colombia, and Gaza beckon.

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