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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/
Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.
Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...
Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?
The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."
1: Droning a drug boat isn't a war. Obama droned more weddings than Trump has boats.
2: "Trump's fixation with the spoils of war"? Did you just make that up? Or are we supposed to take that as a given?
My experience is that people who reason from their own ability to read the minds of people they hate are rarely anywhere near the mark.
Trump had said US should have taken (meaning stolen) Iraqi oil on multiple occasions.
I mean, maybe we should have. It's hard to imagine a counterfactual world where Iraq had a thriving US-financed and operated oil infustry employing locals and generating economic activity/tax revenue is worse for the Iraqi people than what they currently have.
A western-backed petrol state is vastly preferable to a failed state, for essentially everyone except the jihadis. Just ask the Kuwaitis.
Except then you're basically committing to a permanent military presence wherever oil is produced, which is throughout the country. You may be okay with that, but selling the war as an effective permanent takeover was never going to be politically tenable. We would have had to commit to nation building as a side effect.
It's called a territory, we have many.
It would still have been better than what we got.
In 2006 there were 140,000 US troops in Iraq. By contrast, when the Afghanistan drawdown began there were 5,000 troops stationed there, and there were never many more than 100,000 throughout the war. I picked 2006 because it was a typical mid-war year that wasn't part of a surge or a drawdown. That year we spent $70 billion on the war and suffered 821 killed and over 6400 wounded. You can also add on the 32 billion in Iraqi government spending that they paid for themselves out of oil revenue. Which revenue, by the way, wasn't anywhere near what they needed it to be, since the war was disrupting the supply. With that kind of production, the price of oil would have to be about $140/bbl just for them to pay for security and government funding i.e. it has to be that much just to get to what would be a price of $0 in any other context. Then add all the normal expenses on top of that and you're looking at prices that have never existed just to hit breakeven and not make any money.
And even if it were profitable, profitable for whom? Do you think the US government was going to operate these fields at taxpayer expense and give everyone free gas? No, it was going to give concessions to private companies and charge a royalty, the same as it does on public lands in the US. This was traditionally 12.5%, even as rates crept upward during the fracking boom, and have only gotten up to 16.67% with the Inflation Reduction Act. I spent a decade in the industry and the largest royalty I ever saw on a lease was 20% in the Utica. At any rate, the Iraqi government made about 90 billion in oil revenue last year, but there's no war going on, and the 2006 numbers suggest we can comfortably halve that. So about 45 billion in additional government revenue, against about 100 billion in expenditures. I don't see how this is better than what we got.
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