It’s The Iraq War All Over Again - Only This Time They Willing To Admit It’s About Oil.
Hearing Rep. Maria Salazar, a sitting member of Congress from Florida’s 27th district, go on Fox Business and openly say the quiet part out loud: that invading Venezuela would mean trillions of dollars in profits for American oil companies, has left me at a loss for words.
She didn’t stumble.
She didn’t misspeak.
She said it with confidence…like that’s a completely normal justification for war.
And honestly, that’s what shook me the most.
Not just the comment itself, but how casual it was.
She talked about war like it’s a business opportunity.
And it made me think about how different this moment is from the Bush era.
Back then, they at least pretended.
They lied about weapons of mass destruction.
They manufactured intelligence.
They trotted out Colin Powell with fake evidence, because even the Bush administration understood that you can’t just say, “We want their oil.”
But Trump’s Republicans?
No shame. No pretense. No attempt to mask it in humanitarian language or national security jargon.
They’re telling us, directly, that the reason they want to destabilize a country of 30 million people is profit.
Oil profit.
Corporate profit.
Trillions of dollars of profit.
And somehow we’re supposed to hear that and just… shrug?
Trump’s “Pro-Peace” Branding Was Always a Lie
What makes this moment even more surreal is remembering that Donald Trump ran around calling himself a “pro-peace” president.
He said he’d end endless wars.
He said he’d put America first.
He said he’d stop sending young people to die for corporate interests.
And yet:
He ordered more airstrikes than Obama in his first two years
He dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan
He tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government during his first term
He escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of full-scale war
He’s openly talked about taking oil from countries the U.S. invades, his words, not mine
He’s bombed Yemen
He’s bombed Somalia
He’s threatening to bomb Mexico
He threatened to annex the Panama Canal
He’s threatened to steal Greenland
He’s threatened to steal land from Canada
He’s threatened to annex Gaza
And now Republicans around him are openly fantasizing about a resource grab in Venezuela
“Pro-peace” where?
For who?
Because from where I’m sitting, the only peace Trump cares about is the peace of billionaires who want uninterrupted access to foreign resources.
What an Invasion Would Actually Mean
Let’s talk about the real cost here, the cost that never makes it onto Fox Business when they’re daydreaming about oil profits.
For Venezuela:
This would be catastrophic.
War isn’t clean.
It’s not “precision.”
It’s not a Marvel movie.
It’s chaos, displacement, starvation, infrastructure collapse, and generational trauma. Venezuela is already dealing with economic crisis and political instability, adding a U.S.-led war on top of that would mean devastation on a scale most Americans can’t even imagine.
For neighboring countries:
Millions of refugees.
Families ripped apart.
Smaller nations forced to absorb a crisis they didn’t create.
Entire regions destabilized for decades.
We’ve seen this story play out over and over again, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya. The ripple effects never stay contained.
For Americans:
Let’s be brutally honest about what “trillions in profit” means:
American soldiers will die so oil executives can get richer.
Young people, many of them working-class kids who enlisted because college was unaffordable, will be sent to fight and die in a war whose purpose is being spelled out on cable television in advance: profit.
And while the wealthy collect checks, everyone else will pay the price:
higher fuel costs
higher taxes
destabilized markets
military families shattered
military members killed
other military members coming home with PTSD
veterans abandoned by the same politicians who sent them to fight
The human cost is real.
The grief is real.
The violence is real.
But to the people cheering this on?
It’s just a line on a spreadsheet.
We Can’t Pretend We Didn’t Hear Them
When politicians start openly admitting they want war because it’s profitable, that’s not a gaffe.
That’s a warning.
They’re telling us exactly what they plan to do.
And they’re counting on us being too exhausted, too overwhelmed, or too numb to respond.
But we see it.
We hear it.
And we’re not going to be silent about it.
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Until next time,
Desmond
