Before it becomes ‘another Iraq’: Rethinking policy toward Venezuela

Before it becomes ‘another Iraq’: Rethinking policy toward Venezuela

by Sophia Gonzalez

898 words

A president being taken into custody by foreign special operations forces is the kind of news that lands with a thud. It doesn’t feel like “policy.” It feels like the floor shifting under people who are already living with too much uncertainty.

In Venezuela, uncertainty isn’t abstract. It looks like this: a mother torn between staying in the only neighborhood she knows and risking a border crossing she’s never even seen; a grandfather who has to stay behind because the journey would be too much for him; a child who’s learned the sound of bare shelves better than the ring of a school bell. These are the people who wind up bearing the real cost of sweeping decisions made far from their lives.

That’s why the comparison to Iraq keeps surfacing — not because Venezuela and Iraq are the same country, but because the logic of intervention can look the same no matter where it plays out.

Iraq taught Americans something painfully simple: taking down a leader is not the same thing as building a future.

Back in 2003, the case for invading Iraq was pitched with confidence. The language was clean and certain: weapons, threats, urgency. Later, official findings showed the story did not hold up the way it was sold. But by then, the damage was already baked in. You can’t “undo” a shattered state the way you undo a talking point.

Once the top of a government is knocked out violently, a country doesn’t neatly reorganize itself. The power vacuum doesn’t stay empty. It gets filled — sometimes by the loudest faction, sometimes by the most ruthless, sometimes by whoever has the best weapons and the least hesitation. Ordinary people don’t get a vote on that.

Venezuela is already a fragile place, even without an external shock. Millions have left over the last several years. Many who remain are not staying because life is good; they’re staying because leaving is expensive, scary, and often impossible. When a country is already stretched that thin, political upheaval doesn’t arrive as a clean reset. It arrives as more fear, more shortages, more reasons to run.

There’s also a practical question that never goes away in these situations: what’s the endgame?

If the goal is “democracy,” what does that mean on the ground? Elections require trust, basic security, functioning institutions, and the feeling — even a faint hope — that the rules will apply tomorrow. Those things cannot be delivered at the barrel of a gun. They’re grown slowly, like anything real.

If the goal is “stability,” stability isn’t produced by humiliation. It’s produced by legitimacy. A political transition that looks like it was designed in another capital will struggle to earn legitimacy in the streets where people actually live.

And then there’s the part everyone pretends is awkward to talk about: resources.

Venezuela sits on enormous oil reserves. So did Iraq. When policy decisions line up in a way that expands outside access to a country’s oil at the same time its leadership is removed by force, a lot of people — especially in Latin America — don’t see “freedom.” They see a pattern. They see an old story in a newer suit.

That suspicion did not come out of thin air. The region’s memory includes coups, covert operations, and “temporary” interventions that turned into long, bitter chapters. Even Americans who don’t know the details can understand the emotional math: when powerful countries meddle, the target country’s civilians usually pay first and pay longest.

None of this requires defending Maduro. Criticizing an authoritarian leader is easy. The hard part is refusing the shortcut.

A peace-and-justice approach asks a different question: what choice causes the least harm to civilians?

A nonviolent approach also requires some humility. Venezuela’s crisis is real. It’s political, economic, and humanitarian all at once. But solving a crisis like that takes patience and boring work — the kind that doesn’t make for dramatic footage.

Here are steps that would actually match the language of peace and human dignity:

First: Put humanitarian protection at the center. That means making sure food, medicine, and public health support reach civilians without becoming trophies in a political fight.

Second: Invest in diplomacy that treats regional partners as partners, not props. Negotiations are slow, frustrating, and imperfect — and they’re still better than turning cities into chessboards.

Third: Use targeted tools against corruption and abuses without crushing ordinary families. Broad punishment tends to land on the people who have the least power to change anything.

Fourth: Support election monitoring and civic rebuilding in ways that Venezuelans can trust. Trust doesn’t come from foreign threats. It comes from transparency, local ownership, and time.

This isn’t naïve. It’s the opposite. It’s what you conclude after watching what “shock and awe” looks like years later — when the cameras leave, when the slogans fade, when the refugees are still refugees.

Iraq’s deepest lesson wasn’t only that intelligence can be wrong. It was that a military takedown is not a plan for peace. It’s often the beginning of a long season of grief.

Venezuela does not need to become another country that people talk about in the past tense — as in, “It used to be… before the intervention.”

If peace is the goal, the method has to look like peace. Otherwise, history will do what it always does: it will repeat itself, and the most impacted folks will be the ones who recognize the pattern first.

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Sophia Gonzalez, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an American political analyst focusing on U.S. strategy, Middle East affairs, and global security. She writes to challenge interventionism and promote diplomacy. Contact her for related art.