The US attack on Venezuela relies on the same deception that justified the war in Iraq: the idea of self-financing wars with oil.
President Trump said Saturday that the US will run Venezuela following the capture of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. “It won’t cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial,” he said at a Saturday press conference at Mar-a-Lago following news of the US attack. But we’ve been down this road before.
“There’s a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz claimed about Iraq in March 2003, the same month as the US invasion. “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” He said oil revenues could bring $50-100 billion over the first years of the invasion.
That wasn’t the case, and just like what would happen in Iraq, the military campaign in Venezuela is likely to have steep costs.
Bullshit. US oil majors will extract all the oil wealth they can offshore and onshore, sell that oil internationally, keep the profits, pay a (small) portion in taxes and other fees, meanwhile the US will spend another 10? 20? years and fuck knows how many trillions of dollars in another endless vague undefined war while the defense contractors old and new (Google, MS, etc) get rich