Naomi Girson | opinions editor

I spent a bulk of my winter break watching movies. One that I’ve really fallen prey to was an incredibly topical documentary made by Michael Moore, a director known for his political hot takes put to full scale productions.

“Fahrenheit 9/11,” released in 2004, opens with the tragic story of Democrat Al Gore losing the 2000 election against Republican George W. Bush. But the film transforms into an up-close and personal look at the effect the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq had, on both the Iraqi people and the grieving families of fallen soldiers back in the states.

So imagine my surprise when I’m scrolling through my news feed this week, and I came across the same story I thought I had just watched in a documentary that was released the year I was born.

Venezuela has very quickly become the new Iraq. And by that, I mean Venezuela offers something no other nation can provide, a fifth of the world’s oil, more than any other country on earth, according to OPEC.

If you are a post 9/11 baby you may not recall, but the Iraq War began when Bush, president at the time, sent at least 1 million troops to Iraq over roughly eight years of war, according to the Council of Foreign Relations. They failed to destroy the weapons of mass destruction they were hunting for, but they did tap those oil reserves. And private companies profited off of the oil and technology sales to help war efforts, all according to The Business and Human Rights Centre.

The downside of all of it was sending militia recruited from the poorest parts of the country into battle, and they were the ones who quite possibly saw the least profit in all of the smoke.

Flash forward to now on Jan. 3 President Donald Trump recently sent U.S. troops into Caracas to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on numerous criminal charges.

“Maduro is accused of overseeing a cocaine-trafficking network with international drug cartels and faces four criminal counts: narco-terrorism, cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns and destructive devices,” according to Reuters. Of course, none of those accusations have anything to do with what Trump wants; oil.

Maduro, now facing charges in New York, maintains that he was kidnapped by the United States and that he is innocent.

The real reason behind it all, is, once again, oil profits. But this time, the administration isn’t even trying to be diplomatic about the whole ordeal.

Trump has not been shy about his plans to tap into Venezuela’s oil and sell it to other nations.

“We’re going to be taking a tremendous amount of wealth from the ground,” Trump said in a news conference not long after capturing the president.

The consensus from the Venezuelan government is a little bit different.

“The objective of this attack is none other than to seize Venezuela’s strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, attempting to forcibly break the political independence of the nation,” said a communiqué from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Clearly a difference in opinion.

But it is another stir from the government, another fear-mongering, ostentatious and inhumane distraction to keep people from realizing what they realized far too late with Iraq.

The Iraq War was unnecessary, this abduction of another nation’s current president is unnecessary, but it surely won’t be nonconsequential for either nation involved.

During the Iraq war, with a million soldiers sent into conflict, they actually had nothing to do. The U.S. government was fearmongering in a freshly post 9/11 world.

If what happened with the Iraq War is happening again with Venezuela, I have bad news for the battered and underfunded communities around the country.

During the Iraq War, with so many American soldiers dying at the hands of the unruly warfare, back home in the U.S. recruiters looked for possible soldiers in people that came from the poorest areas in the country, to ship them off to Baghdad.

According to data from the Pentagon in 2003 reported by The Seattle Times, 44% of recruits in 2003 came from rural areas, compared to only 14% in major cities. Additionally, almost 66% of recruits came from counties with a lower median household income than the U.S., median.

And this is a trend that has continued well past the Iraq War.

“The military recruits heavily among young people, often targeting those from poorer neighborhoods. In a 2017 Pentagon poll, 49% of respondents said that one reason they were motivated to join the military was in order to pay for future education. Signing bonuses and the prospect of American citizenship are also motivators for new recruits from low-income families,” according to a 2019 study from Brown University.

And returning completely to the present day, we can see the U.S. Army enrollment is back up, according to the U.S. Department of War.

“Since November 2024, our military has seen its highest recruiting percentage of mission achieved in more than 15 years,” said Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell, in December.

I’m not recommending that people don’t enlist if they feel that call to the military, but I would check out Moore’s documentary before you make any rash decisions.

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu