Always About The Oil

Re: the current Maduro/Venezuela situation:

It's always about the oil, nothing new there. Big Oil & West/US governments have always worked in tandem to get it. And Big Oil's dropped plenty of money into Trump Inc., ie his Trump Shitcoin or some other money making Trump Family presidential side hustle, to get back at it after they got cut off by Venezuela nationalization of their oil operations a while back. Cue the enormous flotilla of Navy assets dispatched by Trump so large it barely can all fit in the Caribbean Sea.

Are the comparisons to Iraq are apt? Meh... likely for every instance the West has meddled in Iraq TBH. There's the actual creation of the modern state of Iraq from the UK carving up its victories over the Ottoman Empire like a pie, making sure to get a bit of oil in every slice possible, and totally disregarding the cultural and societal fallout from such sudden arbitrary borders. The Kurds have been on the shit end of that deal which put them directly under Arab rule, and the fall out's continuing to this day.

Then there's the Saddam Hussein instance. The US was his number on champion for a time as they viewed his Iraq as a stabilizing influence over the region which was good for Big Oil. Even more so during the Iran/Iraq War when Saddam was supplied with the latest & greatest military hardware and tech to go along with the chemical weapons they could care less he was already using. The US did not hardly bat an eye at his gassing the Iraqi Kurds which he accused of supporting Iran. The poor Kurds getting a shit deal again, this time from Iran that likely held out the promise of a Kurdish State if Iran was able to defeat Iraq; and from the US that only cared about the continuity of free flowing oil form the region by all means. Then Saddam got to big for his britches.

Bringing us to the Iraqi War instance where Saddam accused Kuwait, another little tiny oil rich pie slice country, of slant drilling into his oil fields. Were they? Maybe they though they were owed since they had funded some of Saddam's war effort against Iran, or maybe Saddam just accused them so as not to have to pay back the war funds debt. So either way Saddam decided to use the nice new shiny military gear to invade Kuwait. Big mistake for him. And the beginning of his & Iraq's downfall. Threatening to majorly impact Big Oil's cash flow from the region led to a massive bombing of Iraqi assets and armed troops to retake that juicy oil piece Kuwait back. Threatening President W Bush's Dad who was president during the Iraqi invasion led to Saddam's death in the second US Iraq war under W. So now the country is basically a 3 sectioned mess of no centralized governance. But the Kurds did manage to get one of the sections for themselves, a little win for them. And now the Kuwaitis can slant drill into the Iraqi oil fields all they want with no worries which means profits will continue to be good for Big Oil.

---

anonymous Political January 04, 2026 at 10:30 am 1 1