A. Lee | Red Phoenix correspondent | Georgia–

“An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence – such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.”

V. I. Lenin

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately then you’ve likely heard a thing or two about Venezuela, a South American nation whose refusal to bow to the American empire has drawn the ire of the Trump administration, leading to a naval blockade, covert military strikes, and as of Jan. 3, the reported capture of President Nicolas Maduro. The American regime has attempted to justify the escalation of military action against Venezuela as part of a war on supposed “narco-terrorism”, a clear falsehood given the recent clemency the same President Trump granted to several prolific drug traffickers including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Recent statements from sex criminal and United States President Donald Trump may shed some light upon the true intentions behind this flagrant violation of both national and international law. At his press conference after the bombing of Caracas, Trump stated that “[…]the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time…  We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money.”

Feelings of deja vu aren’t exactly unwarranted. In 2003, nearly 23 years ago, the United States was responsible for a similar military venture, with the infamous invasion of Iraq. American citizens were told that our government intended to punish Al-Qaeda and its Leader, Osama Bin Laden, for the 9/11 terror attacks, and yet today we know that there was no cooperation between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and that the American intelligence community was well aware of this fact then. We were told that Suddam Hussein was in the process of developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, and this claim would prove to have been knowingly fabricated as well.

So why were nearly 5,000 American soldiers and mercenaries sent to their death halfway across the globe? Why were hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians massacred by coalition forces? And what can it tell us about the motivations underlying the bloodshed that is unfolding in Venezuela today? 

The most glaring similarity between Iraq and Venezuela is the fact that both Iraq and Venezuela are members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. The formation of OPEC constituted a monumental shift in terms of the economic sovereignty of oil-exporting nations such as Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and others which for decades had been dominated by European and American monopolies. Prior to the American invasion of Iraq, member states of OPEC, including Iraq itself, had demonstrated their ability to negatively impact the American economy through their combined control of a substantial portion of the world’s oil supply. 

Perhaps this is why George W. Bush, a Republican who had substantial monetary backing from petroleum corporations, saw it as imperative to seize control and brutally invade Iraq while seizing its oil reserves. And sure enough, the Provisional Authority established during the occupation of Iraq would enshrine into law things like Order 39, which forcibly opened “all economic sectors in Iraq” to unrestricted foreign investment. This was not enough either, six years later then Vice President Joseph Biden would visit Iraq, still under American military occupation, to pressure Iraqi leaders for further concessions for international oil investors.

And so, the true nature of these two American invasions is laid bare for all to see. The American government, yet again, has wrought bloodshed to satisfy the predatory economic interests of the capitalist class, inveterate mendacious imperialists , for which in the search of profit; no cost is too great. They will violate international law, they will lie to the international community, they will ship soldiers and American children of workers overseas to murder Venezuelan and South American workers, they will break our bodies and minds in service of their empire and they will abandon us when they have exhausted our usefulness, and then they will bury us, leaving behind a ruined economy and exacerbating already critical climate crises. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

You can break free from their lies and stand arm-in-arm with your neighbors and fellow workers. You can fight for your own interests; you can fight for truth, for peace, for economic justice, and for dignity, for this generation and all to follow. We must organize our communities and build up our power together, united in class struggle against our common oppressor.

Categories: Anti-War, U.S. News