On October 16, an unusual warning went out on Trinidadian airwaves. “Fishermen are being warned to slow down and stay close to shore amid fears of being bombed by the United States military,” the anchor on CNC3 began, “which continues its anti-narcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea.” Two Trinidadian fishermen, Chad Joseph and Richie Samaroo, had been killed in a U.S. Navy airstrike targeting their boat as they left Venezuela for Trinidad, a short 6-mile trip that Joseph had told his family about. President Donald Trump had claimed the boat was a “vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” without naming the drug cartel it was supposedly affiliated with, and that “intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics” along a known “DTO route.”

The killing of a friendly country’s nationals, in America’s backyard, in a targeted American airstrike, should have been news alone. But it has been only a brick in the wall of a war that is being constructed in the southern Caribbean, one that is being built up in ways both overt and disturbingly covert.

As of the time of this writing, eight American warships, manned by more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, have been placed just outside of Venezuelan waters. The New York Times has identified guided-missile cruisers moving close to Venezuelan shores, as well as Reaper drones stationed nearby in Puerto Rico, alongside a number of stealth fighter jets. On Wednesday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on X that the military escalated this campaign by conducting a lethal airstrike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, off of Colombia’s waters, just days after Trump accused its president, Gustavo Petro, of being an “illegal drug dealer” after he criticized the American campaign in the Caribbean. 

Some of the ships identified by CNN, like the USS San Antonio and the USS Gravely, have gained combat experience fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen, attempting to break their blockade in the Red Sea against Israel-bound cargo ships. Now, such U.S. military resources have been moved to the Caribbean, to deal with the next American enemy.

The target is clear: Nicolás Maduro, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. But the United States government is not saying that, at least outright.

Since the beginning of September, the American military has begun striking alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean, extrajudicially executing accused drug runners after declaring a multitude of drug cartels to be terrorist organizations, on par with the Islamic State. Drug trafficking is not an executable offense, but by designating them as terrorists, and claiming, according to Trump, to be saving “25,000 people” with every boat struck, all could be justified. This became even more true with the declaration that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, the same declaration issued regarding the war in Afghanistan; cartel members were designated as “unlawful combatants,” the same designation given to those in Al Qaeda.

Maduro’s name, and the spurious accusation that he is a drug kingpin, have been mentioned by the Department of Justice (joining with the State Department to put a $50 million bounty on his head), and Venezuela has been on the president’s lips whenever asked, even saying outright that he had greenlit covert CIA action in Venezuela and potentially even strikes on land inside the country. But news about the growing air of potential war with Venezuela has taken a backseat to the news of occasional strikes on boats in the Caribbean, which have now become so routine over the past two months that they barely register as noise. Still surprising, sure, but on the road to being as unworthy of note as individual strikes would be in Yemen earlier this year, their legal implications becoming as un-noteworthy as the strikes in the 2010s that killed young American citizens under the justification that their parent was a terrorist, so spilling their blood was permissible.

Mainstream media organizations are covering the strikes and the massive military buildup outside of Venezuela’s borders, but the gravity of the situation, with the dubiousness of the accusations levied and a potential major invasion of a country with the world’s largest oil reserves looming, is strangely unfelt, especially by the government that is spearheading it.

The major stage of the buildup to the Iraq War was a process that took more than a year, with congressional authorizations of force, speeches made to the U.N., extensive laundering of faulty intelligence through numerous media organizations at the highest of levels, with stories of leaks and whistleblowers and weapons of mass destruction and a threat growing in Baghdad that not only threatened Kuwait but also the entire world. Major news outlets ran countdown timers to the invasion and placed the entire country of Iraq in crosshairs in their graphics packages. Massive protests of millions preceded the invasion, attempting in vain to halt its march, but still showing in great numbers that opposition to the war would not go quietly. By contrast, a potential invasion of Venezuela is being treated as almost a foregone conclusion.

Venezuela has for years been demonized in the media, becoming a favorite bogeyman of American political thrillers and rousing people’s interest whenever anti-government protests rock the country. But Venezuela threatens no American interests militarily, has no ballistic missile program with which to strike the American heartland, no weapons of mass destruction program, nor even accusations of such a program. There are barely any leakers, zero claims of a global threat, no media laundering of intelligence. The narrative, however, has been set in stone from the beginning — and without strong opposition to it, there was no need to justify it.

A potential invasion of Venezuela is being treated as almost a foregone conclusion.

Maduro and his government have been deemed terrorists retroactively, with a myriad number of drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations, connections then drawn by the U.S. from those cartels to the Venezuelan state, and Maduro then named as a cartel head himself. By calling them terrorists, the most violent manner of carnage can be wrought against Venezuela and its people, and conversely, not much attention need be paid to it, as attacking “terrorists” has become mundane to both the U.S. government and the news media.

We already know a potential invasion of Venezuela would be a disaster. Estimates from 2019 predicted up to 200,000 U.S. troops would be needed to maintain order, to say nothing of the mountainous terrain that soldiers would need to traverse, and a nightmarish insurgency that would make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

But the potential risks of intervention are no longer an object to the government, just as state-building, stabilization, and producing a functioning democracy are no longer the stated priorities they may have been to past presidents. Trump’s military doctrine has focused squarely on death, destruction, terror, and destabilization as the aim — unconcerned by consequences, uncaring of justification, and desperate to create failed states where there had been functioning ones. This cavalier attitude toward the future can be seen in public statements from administration officials, with one unnamed adviser telling Axios, “Leaving Maduro in power in Venezuela is like making Jeffrey Epstein the head of a daycare.”

War abroad for nonsensical reasons has existed since time immemorial, but the age of the justified war — as in war that a government takes time to justify to the public, regardless of whether it’s based on a truth or a lie — is nearing its demise. Joe Biden justified bombing Yemen to the public by saying it needed to preserve “product shipping times.” Trump justifies bombing Venezuela because “300 million people died of drug overdoses last year,” a number that no one finds credible, but it’s just as well, a blatantly false claim no one is perturbed by any longer.

When asked by a reporter on October 15 if the CIA will be authorized to “take out” Maduro, Trump gave an answer that inadvertently summed up the absurdity of the war the United States is being slow-walked into against its will: “That’s a ridiculous question. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?”

The post The U.S. Isn’t Even Bothering With Its Usual Lies to Sell Its Regime Change War in Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.