Welcome to our New 20-Year Vietnam War in Venezuela

Get ready for another 20 years of war, just as we had in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as Trump tries to “run” Venezuela and “fix it.” “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” said war-crazy Trumputin. “We need total access. We need access to oil and to other things in their country.”

We can expect a lot of resistance:

• Venezuela ordered police to find and arrest anyone involved in supporting U.S. attack.
• General Vladimir Padrino López ordered the Venezuelan armed forces to resist the U.S. presence and announced a deployment of military forces across the country.
• The top 5 allies of Nicholas Maduro still hold power in Venezuela

The chart below summarizes our previous endless wars. Each one ended in defeat or failure.

Conflict	Years	Length	Cost	U.S. Forces Killed	U.S. Forces Wounded
Iraq	2003–2021	18 years	$1.3 trillion	4,600	32,000
Afghanistan	2001–2021	20 years	$1 trillion	2,460	20,770
Vietnam	1955–1975	20 years	$168 billion	58,281	153,372

The Vietnam War started in 1955 when the U.S. military began to build the South Vietnamese army, and to stop the spread of Communism. By 1962, roughly 11,000 U.S. military personnel were in South Vietnam. By the end of 1965, U.S. troop levels rose to 184,000. The war ended in disaster.

The Afghanistan war started after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. by al‑Qaeda, killing nearly 3,000 people. The U.S. invaded the next month, and troop levels peaked at 100,000. That war ended in disaster, too.

The Iraq War began in March 2003 when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, based on imaginary claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Roughly 150,000 U.S. troops began with “shock and awe” airstrikes and a ground invasion from Kuwait. Historians, policy analysts, and many U.S. officials now regard the Iraq War as an overall failure.

The Venezuelan War has started with Trump’s plans to have a military presence “as it pertains to oil.” There is no governance blueprint nor any specifics for any of this.

$1 billion and counting

How many boots on the ground will be needed to occupy Venezuela’s 5,000 active oil and gas wells? Venezuela’s state-owned oil company employs approximately 90,000 workers total across all operations. A U.S. Army platoon typically consists of 30 to 50 soldiers. A company contains 100-150 soldiers.

The cost to kidnap Venezuela’s dictator and blockade its coastline so far is  $1 billion for Operation Southern Spear since last August. It includes an aircraft carrier plus a dozen warships and scores of fighter jets, drone and surveillance aircraft — along with approximately 15,000 troops.

This operation caps a month of U.S. strikes on Islamist militants in Syria and in Nigeria. Trumputin is already threatening military attacks on Greenland, Colombia, Iran and Cuba (32 Cuban security personnel were killed in the Maduro abduction). But that’s a story for another day.

A war nobody wants

Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, initially condemned the U.S. raid as “barbarity” and an “atrocity that violates international law,” vowing Venezuela wouldn’t become a U.S. “colony.” Then Trump said that she would “pay a very big price” for non-cooperation. A ruthlessly ambitious and Machiavellian, she abruptly shifted to inviting the U.S. to “collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation.”

A CBS News poll last month found that 70% of Americans oppose U.S. military action in Venezuela and that only 13% believe the country is a major threat to the United States.

A YouGov poll found that only 20% of American adults support using military force to overthrow Nicolas Maduro.

Rachel Maddow reported that 87% of Americans do not see Venezuela as a major threat.

And an important point from Dan Pfeiffer: “Trump’s biggest political problem isn’t just that this war is unpopular. It’s that it’s yet another massive, time-consuming distraction from the thing he was elected to do: lower the cost of living.”