Trump And Threats To Invade Venezuela

As Donald Trump threatens to invade Venezuela, it reminds me a lot of George W. Bush's rush to invade Iraq in the 2000s.

I don't like Nicolas Maduro. I think Maduro is a brutal dictator.

But I didn't like Saddam Hussein either, yet I still opposed the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. has a terrible history of intervening in the affairs of Latin American nations for its own business interests. Several Latin American countries have seen the CIA conduct the overthrow of democratically elected leaders and install right wing authoritarian regimes that have been guilty of human rights abuses against indigenous people and the poor.

The U.S. created The School of the Americas that trained right wing dictators and paramilitary forces on torture, repression and other human rights violations.

Trump has gotten rid of many experts in the Pentagon and replaced them with loyalists who only tell Trump what he wants to hear. This makes the Trump administration very vulnerable to groupthink, which has led other administrations into disasters.

The Kennedy administration and the Bay of Pigs, and the son Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq both got caught up in groupthink.

Here's a youtube video showing my process in creating this cartoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pZFaETG1nI

REFERENCES
"What Explains Trump’s Aggression Toward Venezuela? Who Knows. To better understand the president’s foreign policy, one must study the behavior of small children." by Jonathan Chait for The Atlantic Magazine
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-boat-strikes-war-ven…

"A Short History of the Long War on Drugs in Latin America. How did we get to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response is little more than a shrug?" by Greg Grandin for The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/war-on-drugs-latin-america/

"A Lawless Trump Administration Runs Amok in the Caribbean. As great powers abandon even the pretense of law, the undeclared war on Venezuela exposes a world ruled by extortion, collapse, and the redefinition of sovereignty." by Benjamin Fogel for Jacobin Magazine
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/venezuela-trump-law-war-sovereignty

"Did a U.S. Boat Strike Amount to a War Crime?" a New York Times Podcast with Rachel Abrams and Charlie Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqs-LJHpUhA

"‘Voodoo Rituals’ and Banana Wars: U.S. Military Action in Latin America" by Helene Cooper for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/military-history-latin-a…

"Operation Condor: A Network of Transnational Repression 50 Years Later. How Condor launched a wave of cross-border assassinations and disappearances in Latin America." by Peter Kornbluh for The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/latin-america-dictatorship-cove…

"Why we call for the closure of the School of the Americas" by Mary Ann McGivern for The National Catholic Reporter
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/why-we-call-closure-school-am…