How Venezuela Becomes a Quagmire

Venezuela is not Iraq. But much as the legacy of U.S. President George W. Bush became tied to Iraq’s fate, President Donald Trump’s legacy now depends in some measure on how events unfold in Venezuela. There are, of course, key differences between Washington’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and the operation against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: most obviously, Bush pursued the ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with an invading force of more than 150,000 American troops. He acted after the UN passed 16 resolutions condemning Saddam’s activities, Washington assembled a coalition of 49 supporting countries, and Congress authorized the use of force. By contrast, Trump’s “Operation Absolute Resolve” to extract Maduro was a surprise to everyone, including Congress, and involved some 200 Americans over the course of two and a half hours.

But the United States’ painful experience in Iraq has more lessons for Venezuela than observers might think. I spent a total of nearly two years on the ground in Iraq, arriving days after Saddam fled Baghdad and staying throughout the entire occupation, and aspects of Venezuela’s current situation seem familiar. Then, as now, citizens and a substantial diaspora initially appeared elated that the United States had removed a repressive dictator. Then, as now, the United States presumed that after a tyrant’s removal, other elements of the state bureaucracy—including security forces necessary to maintain order—would continue to function. And then, as now, Washington believed that a lightning-quick, successful military operation would impress its allies and intimidate its adversaries, helping deliver the cooperation of regional powers without much more effort.

In the case of Iraq, these assumptions—and others—turned out to be dangerously wrong. The United States’ experience there serves as a warning about how the lack of adequate preparation for the “day after” the toppling of a dictator can communicate American weakness to the world, even after a highly successful military operation. Indeed, Washington’s rivals for influence in the region initially quivered in the face of overwhelming U.S. military power: Iran’s Islamic regime paused its development of nuclear weapons, Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program, and Syria eventually ended its nearly 30-year occupation of Lebanon. Yet subsequent—and in many cases, avoidable—missteps in Iraq eventually created an overwhelming narrative of failure, complicating U.S. actions and relationships worldwide and emboldening rivals.

Considering five hard-earned lessons from Iraq could help the Trump administration deliver a better outcome in Venezuela, both for its citizens and for Americans. First, Washington must not presume that a regime will survive after its top leader is removed; it therefore must have a plan to provide law and order in case they break down. Second, it should prepare for the inevitable toxicity of the narrative that the United States is after oil alone and how that narrative can disrupt U.S. aims. Third, it must appreciate that the promotion of democracy might be needed—not out of a sense of altruism but to deliver stability. Fourth, it must be prepared to allocate resources to secure a better outcome, even if a country’s resources promise great future wealth. And finally, the United States cannot assume that its power will ensure positive results without the help and support of regional actors.

UNSTABLE FRACTURE

Many Venezuelans are understandably thrilled that the United States removed Maduro. Many Iraqis, too, were pleased by Saddam’s ouster. When I arrived in Baghdad days after he fled the city in April 2003, Iraqis evinced a cautious optimism; many were simultaneously exuberant and uncertain about what would come next. But any pro-American sentiment soured quickly in the face of the disorder and violence that followed the U.S. military operation.

Perhaps the most damaging of all the assumptions U.S. officials made was that Iraqi government ministries, including some security forces, would continue to effectively operate. Even weeks into the invasion, code-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration had no intention of occupying the country. The United States’ experience in Afghanistan, just a year and a half earlier, had created expectations for a swift and limited involvement: after the United States entered that country to topple the Taliban regime, a domestic and regional consensus quickly formed that Hamid Karzai would be the country’s most appropriate first post-Taliban leader. Karzai was sworn in as chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority 40 days after Kabul fell to the U.S. military.

Iraq once had a well-developed civil service, and U.S. leaders presumed the country would require little day-to-day governance by the United States after a suitable new leader had been identified. As the invasion got underway, there were debates in Kuwait, the operation’s staging ground, about what the initial American message to the Iraqi people should be. U.S. leaders decided to emphasize that Iraqis could return to work as normal and that the American involvement would be brief and focused on securing the continuity of Iraqi institutions. When I volunteered to leave a role at the State Department to join a civilian team accompanying the military into Iraq, retired General Jay Garner, who was in charge of civilian operations, encouraged me to commit to three months on the ground, predicting that after that “we can all go home together.”

But those three months stretched to six, then nine, then 12, then 15, as Iraq’s institutions collapsed after Saddam’s removal and a quick handover became impossible. Decades of poverty, sanctions, and political repression had left the Iraqi population deeply traumatized. And when people sensed that no one was in charge, they took to the streets—both to take revenge on hated institutions and to secure whatever advantage they could in the face of uncertainty and lawlessness. The looting of government buildings and weapons depots as well as sabotage of critical oil and communications infrastructure dramatically set back the United States’ plans. Some of this violence had been set up in advance: Saddam’s regime had made extensive preparations for an insurgency to oppose any U.S. incursion, and after he lost power, those resistance networks were activated, forming the nucleus of an armed resistance that would plague the American military for years. Either out of a lack of ability or will, the United States initially let the chaos unfold; on April 11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said at the Pentagon: “Stuff happens. And it’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

It is far too early to be complacent about the possibility of violence in Venezuela.

The United States’ Iraq experience suggests that the United States should be prepared for the possibility that the Bolivarian regime will not survive the loss of Maduro. This outcome will be likelier if the Trump administration truly moves to stop drug trafficking, oil smuggling, and illicit mining. Venezuela’s armed forces are particularly reliant on the flow of money from drug trafficking and oil smuggling to ensure loyalty and to finance the lifestyles of army generals and local paramilitary groups alike. In a recent interview with the Miami-based radio station Actualidad, an opposition-affiliated retired lieutenant colonel warned that if regime officials “don’t have income from narcotrafficking, black oil, or contraband, they cannot sustain an army.” The Venezuelan military is also historically anti-American and may become dissatisfied with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, if she continues cooperating with Washington as the new interim president. The current regime, in other words, might prove either unable or unwilling to sustain governance and keep the peace.

It is also far too early to be complacent about the possibility of violence and looting. Venezuela’s institutions have been hollowed out after more than a quarter century of Bolivarian rule. Factor in 20 years of U.S. sanctions, chronic hyperinflation, and an estimated poverty rate of 80 percent, and it’s easy to see how the removal of a leader could stoke unrest.

Given the enormous difficulty Washington faced in occupying and governing Iraq, it is understandable that the Trump administration has chosen to keep the Venezuelan regime in place. In fact, senior Trump officials have already cited the poignant lesson Iraq offers about not dismantling an authoritarian regime’s institutions. 

Although the lesson about maintaining institutions is not wrong, implementing it is harder than it sounds. The U.S. policy of “de-Baathification” in Iraq excluded people from governance on the basis of their seniority in Saddam’s Baath Party because it was difficult or impossible to determine their individual complicity in abuses. This policy should not be repeated. In practice, however, once a regime collapses, institutions are no longer robust. And they cannot be maintained or rebuilt without contending with the reality that millions who suffered under that apparatus will desire revenge, or at least accountability. I worked with one Iraqi leader whose nine brothers had been brutally killed by the Baath Party. Asking him to accept that members of the party should maintain privileged positions in society was a nonstarter; this sentiment was shared by many other Iraqis. The challenge is not deciding whether to dismantle institutions; it is figuring out how to save the parts of the regime that remain functional and necessary while responding to—and trying to defuse—a fierce drive for retribution.

BROKEN TRUST

The U.S. failure to address a breakdown of order in Iraq was the first crack in the perception of American invincibility. Before I left the country in June 2004, I asked dozens of Iraqis what the United States had done well and what it had done wrong. Almost all of them told me that looting and lawlessness had set the tone for a transitional period in which no entity was deemed authoritative. A few weeks after Saddam’s removal, I clutched my seat while riding with an Iraqi colleague who sped over a highway divide and through an intersection, oblivious to a dangling traffic light. “When did Iraqis stop obeying traffic lights?” I asked. “The day Saddam fled,” he replied, matter-of-factly. Iraqis had followed laws out of sheer fear for so long that once Saddam was gone, all of them seemed breakable.

As Iraq became more chaotic and the United States found itself governing a country of more than 25 million people with little preparation, my Iraqi colleagues continuously lamented how terrible a supposed superpower was at providing basics such as security and electricity. Increasingly, they wondered what the Americans were doing in Iraq—why had we come? As efforts to rebuild faltered, the narrative that Washington only wanted Iraq’s oil took hold, fueling a nascent insurgency and disillusioning a large majority of citizens.

This narrative proved potent despite the fact that the United States had repeatedly refrained from taking physical possession of the country’s oil fields. In 1991, the United States relinquished the oil fields it had taken control of during its offensive to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. In 2003, the U.S.-led occupying authorities declined to grant new contracts to foreign companies, opting to delay that process until a legitimately elected Iraqi government could make the decisions. (As a result, the first contracts to foreign companies were not awarded until 2009.) Consistent with the approach it had taken since World War II, the United States was more focused on ensuring its ability to access oil on global markets at affordable prices than on physically controlling oil.

The Trump administration’s bald focus on controlling Venezuela’s oil may appeal to a certain American constituency. But it will wear on the Venezuelans celebrating Maduro’s ouster. As in Iraq, a sense is already emerging that the United States lacks an interest in aiding ordinary people and that its ambitions are limited to seizing Venezuela’s resources. Future communications by the White House—both at home and abroad—should instead focus on the United States’ desire for better governance, an objective that Venezuelans and their neighbors share. Many senior Trump administration officials, most notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have already emphasized this angle.

This shift must be not only rhetorical but also reflected in the administration’s actions. It will discover that even if its interests are limited to oil, it will need to help Venezuelans establish a different sort of government if the sector is to flourish. It is inconceivable that Venezuela will be able to attract large-scale capital and U.S. oil companies’ extended investments in the absence of more legitimate, transparent, and rule-bound governance. Similarly, even if Venezuela pursues an oil renaissance by reforming its national oil company, it will need a new regime in place to attract oil experts who fled the country after Hugo Chávez took power in 1999.

IT’S NOT EASY MONEY

Few appreciate another reality about the United States’ approach to Iraq: its persistent efforts to midwife a representative government were ultimately motivated not simply by ideology—a fixation on promoting democracy—but also by pragmatism. In early 2003, some advocates for war believed that a democratic Iraq would change the whole Middle East. But those of us on the ground became further convinced that democracy was needed for other reasons. To stabilize a fractious state with enormous oil resources, the country needed to transition to a broad-based political system. Iraq’s sectarian and ideological divisions meant that no one leader or group could be entrusted to deliver prosperity to all communities; only a representative constitutional government—constructed with checks and balances and opportunities for electoral transfers of power—could convince key constituencies that they would receive their share of the country’s potential wealth.

This theory, however, was easier to articulate than to operationalize. Because the United States’ initial proposal for a transitional political process did not involve holding elections early enough, it was rejected by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whom Iraqi Shiites, the country’s majority sect, considered their most revered and credible leader. Later, U.S. leaders and their Iraqi partners failed to convince Iraqi’s Sunni minority, Saddam’s former base, to join transitional governance bodies. An insufficiently inclusive political transition provided more fodder for the insurgency.

Encouraging a more legitimate government in Venezuela does not require a U.S. occupation. In pursuing a political transition after removing a dictator, Trump’s team has one huge advantage over the Bush administration: Venezuela has opposition leaders who have already mustered clear domestic and international support. In Iraq, the Bush administration had to orchestrate a costly and difficult multiyear effort to find and empower alternative Iraqi leaders. In a 2024 presidential election, by contrast, Venezuelans overwhelmingly voted for Edmundo González Urrutia, the proxy for the opposition leader María Corina Machado, whom Maduro’s government had barred from running. Washington must involve one or both of these figures in an inclusive transition. That transition would ideally also include noncriminal “Chavistas”: lower-ranking military officers, intellectuals who supported the country’s 1999 Bolivarian revolution, and ex-technocrats who served in government at earlier points. These people still represent the sentiments of a substantial portion of Venezuelans, especially those living in poor and rural areas.

Boosting Venezuela’s oil production dramatically could take a decade.

The Trump administration seems to assume that because Venezuela is estimated to hold the largest oil reserves in the world, it will quickly generate sufficient funds to cover a political transition and infrastructural reconstruction. Trump stated this unequivocally in the press conference he held the morning after Maduro’s extraction. This presumption echoes a catastrophic mistake the United States made in Iraq: U.S. leaders persistently underestimated the quantity of resources and diplomatic attention it would take to craft and support a successful political transition, not to mention jump-starting the oil industry and rebuilding infrastructure.

“We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told U.S. lawmakers at a hearing in March 2003, days after the invasion of Iraq began. He projected that the Iraqi oil industry would generate $50 billion to $100 billion in revenue over the next two to three years. The Bush administration lost credibility with both the Iraqis and the U.S. Congress when those assumptions proved patently false. Poor infrastructure, antiquated equipment, and attacks on pipelines caused Iraqi production to fall far short of what the Bush administration had anticipated. Ten months after Wolfowitz’s testimony, the Congressional Budget Office noted that Iraqi oil revenue was insufficient to cover anything beyond government salaries. Three years after Saddam’s ouster, Iraq’s oil output was still 27 percent below prewar levels.

A peaceful political transition leading to more stability and less corruption will make U.S. companies more eager to make long-term investments in Venezuela. But no matter what, efforts to repair long-neglected oil fields and infrastructure will take time. Industry experts are in broad agreement that even presuming a smooth transfer of power, the lifting of international sanctions, and the entrenchment of a pro-investment government, boosting oil production dramatically could take a decade. The United States will need to devote resources to stabilizing Venezuela, managing its political transition, and rebuilding its oil industry, efforts that will likely require congressional appropriations. The Trump administration should therefore work more actively to invest legislators in Venezuela’s success.

CONFIDENCE LIMIT

The Trump administration appears to believe that American power is at an apex. But more than 20 years ago, when the United States was indisputably the world’s only superpower, the Bush administration overestimated its own power and erred badly by neglecting to bring other countries into decisions about Iraq’s fate. It believed its power was so supreme that when its efforts to gain regional support for its invasion failed, it assumed it could deliver a positive outcome without it. Instead, Iraq’s neighbors, particularly Iran and Syria, saw incentives for undermining the U.S.-led transition. And far-flung powers including China and Russia took advantage of the United States’ quagmire in Iraq to advance their own interests, profiting from diminished scrutiny from Washington.

If the Trump administration does not want to find itself in the same position, it should intensify its regional and global consultations on Venezuela. Although the impulse to handle the situation unilaterally is strong, actors in the region and beyond have huge stakes in Venezuela’s future. Bringing them in now will yield large payoffs later on.

In an April 2016 interview, President Barack Obama said his “worst mistake” as president was “probably failing to plan for the day after” the removal of Qaddafi in Libya. Every U.S. president should not have to grasp the same lessons anew. It is not too late for Trump to learn from Iraq so that he does not need to answer a question about Venezuela the same way at the end of his presidency.

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