If you’re old enough to remember Wag the Dog, congratulations: you’re also old enough to recognize when a White House is tossing a foreign military spectacle onto the national stage because the domestic plotline has become… inconvenient.

This weekend’s chest-thumping operation in Venezuela is being sold as something noble, something clean, something—astonishingly—“the exact opposite of Iraq.” That’s not analysis. That’s marketing copy written by people who assume Americans have the collective memory of a goldfish and the attention span of a TikTok ad.

Let’s start with the obvious. When an administration suddenly launches a dramatic overseas military operation while Epstein files loom like a slow-rolling political meteor, skepticism isn’t cynicism—it’s pattern recognition. If this feels like a distraction, that’s because it is. A loud one. A flag-wrapped one. A “look over there” maneuver executed with helicopters instead of press releases.

Pete Hegseth wants you to believe this is not Iraq because—wait for it—this time we’re doing it for profit.

That’s the pitch.

Iraq was bad, he says, because we “purchased in blood” and didn’t get anything “economically in return.” Venezuela, on the other hand, is apparently a limited-edition regime change with a loyalty rewards program. No quagmire, no blowback, just a tidy dictator delivery and—what was it the president said?—“get the oil flowing.”

If that’s the moral distinction, then congratulations: the bar is now somewhere beneath the Earth’s mantle.

Yes, Nicolás Maduro is a brutal authoritarian. That has been true for years. No one serious is disputing that. What’s at issue isn’t whether Maduro is bad news—it’s whether the United States kidnapping a foreign head of state, bypassing Congress entirely, and openly announcing plans to “run the country” until further notice is supposed to be good news.

Because history has some thoughts here.

We have, in fact, tried this before. Repeatedly. Iraq didn’t go well. Libya didn’t go well. Afghanistan didn’t go well. “It’ll be quick,” “it’s different this time,” and “they’ll thank us” are not brave insights—they are the opening lines of every American foreign policy disaster of the last half-century.

And let’s talk about Congress, or rather, its conspicuous absence. No authorization. No debate. No vote. Just a president who campaigned on ending foreign wars deciding—on a weekend—to start another one and daring anyone to stop him. The same people who once screamed about executive overreach now applaud it, as long as it comes with oil reserves and a Fox News chyron.

The hypocrisy would be impressive if it weren’t so naked.

This is also the same political ecosystem that has no problem embracing, excusing, or outright pardoning foreign strongmen when it’s convenient—so spare me the sudden rediscovery of moral clarity. We are not witnessing a crusade for democracy. We’re watching transactional imperialism with better branding.

And if you want to know how this is playing internationally, consider this: when Marine Le Pen—Marine Le Pen, far-right nationalist icon—strongly condemns your military operation, that’s not a sign of restored American leadership. That’s a flashing red warning light on the dashboard.

Even the “peace through strength” mantra collapses under the slightest pressure. Strength without legitimacy isn’t peace—it’s volatility. Strength without allies isn’t leadership—it’s isolation. Strength without accountability is just force, and we’ve spent decades pretending not to understand the difference.

Hegseth calls this a “bold and audacious move.” So was Iraq. So was every war that started with certainty and ended with memorials. Boldness is not wisdom. Audacity is not strategy. And “president of action” is not a synonym for “president of restraint,” no matter how hard they want it to be.

For a man who promised voters he wouldn’t start foreign wars, convicted felon Donald Trump is doing an impressively bad job of keeping that promise—unless we’re redefining “foreign war” as “anything that makes money.”

This isn’t the opposite of Iraq. It’s Iraq with better PowerPoint slides. It’s regime change with a profit motive and a media blitz timed just right to drown out questions no one in power wants to answer.

And if this all feels familiar—if it feels staged, exaggerated, suspiciously cinematic—that’s because Wag the Dog wasn’t a prophecy.

It was a warning.

We ignored it then. We’re being dared to ignore it again.