Donald Trump is conducting a secret war

Yet it’s rare when the United States wages a war without providing the American people with basic information. Even the 2003 war in Iraq, rightly maligned as one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy catastrophes in history, was a relatively transparent affair. Public debate about whether to invade Iraq was sparked almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks and continued until the military campaign began in March 2003. Despite the false intelligence, baseless assumptions and disinformation peddled by the George W. Bush administration—the most prominent being that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had a strategic alliance with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida and a huge chemical weapons program—there were numerous public hearings in which lawmakers were able to grill U.S. officials. The Bush administration made its case to Congress.

Twenty-two years later, the United States is engaged in another war, this time supposedly against drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has taken Hussein’s place as the reviled dictator. The Trump administration alleges he is the head of a grand conspiracy to flood the United States with cocaine and criminals. Though Trump has yet to give orders to bomb Venezuelan military targets or cocaine transit points on land, preferring to stick with attacking boats and killing its occupants whom the White House claims are trafficking drugs. Still, the build-up of U.S. naval assets off Venezuela’s coast, as well as the beginning of a campaign to seize Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas, means military escalation is not off the table.