Daniel Immerwahr

And it was never said, except by critics.

Now you have a press conference on the morning after the invasion of Venezuela saying,

where we have gone in militarily in a huge operation that had been, by the way, been going on for weeks, weeks and weeks, but ends with the president of Venezuela being spirited to a jail cell in Brooklyn.

And while the people around Trump are mouthing these other rationales for it, Trump just gets up and says it's oil.

There's no embarrassment about it at all.

This seems to me something at least performatively new.

Oh, it's totally—that's exactly right.

So—

We on the left during the Iraq war would play this game where we say, okay, the Bush administration, it's saying it's human rights and they have this story about weapons of mass destruction, but we don't believe them.

So we'd look for little reports of off the record statements where someone said something about oil and we'd say, aha, that's the real thing.

That's really what you want.

And the reason is that...

The liberal international order, for good or ill, kind of forced US leaders to say that they were doing things for impartial reasons, for reasons that had the good of the system in mind.

Because the whole point is that the United States had claimed to be an umpire.

world affairs.

And you can't be an umpire if you say, well, I really would prefer that the Dodgers win.

You have to pretend that you're sort of above it all.

And so the Bush administration would do that.

And then its critics would say, I don't really believe you.

I think you're actually, you know, you know, this game is rigged.