In 2002, President George W. Bush tried to recite an old proverb: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” What emerged instead was: “Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”
There is a uniquely American genius in Bush’s famously mangled proverb. Sure, it was a stumble, but it captured something deeper than the original adage. Americans can be persuaded, even misled, but there comes a point when the national instinct kicks in and says: Enough. We’ve seen how this movie ends. And as the drums begin beating along the Caribbean again, U.S. destroyers prowling offshore, administration officials rolling out ominous briefings about “narco terror” networks, and hints of strikes inside Venezuelan territory, those drums sound eerily familiar. Too familiar.
The claim this time? Nicolás Maduro’s government is not just corrupt or authoritarian, but a direct threat to the United States through drug trafficking. It’s the same template we’ve seen in previous eras: take a foreign government that Washington already dislikes, amplify a real but limited problem, declare that problem an existential threat, and then frame military action as not only justified but morally necessary. Americans have watched this logic take us from Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf. They know the phrases by heart: imminent danger, rogue regime, national security imperative. The scriptwriters change, but the script doesn’t.
We’ve Been Told This Story Before
The Iraq War remains the prime example. Faulty intelligence. Shifting rationales. “Mushroom clouds.” The promise of a quick, clean mission that metastasized into a decade long occupation. It was sold as a war of necessity, only for Americans to learn the necessity had been invented.
But the pattern predates Iraq. Ask anyone who lived through the Vietnam era how “limited military support” turned into an ocean of blood. The Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” which provided the legal pretext for escalation, was murky at best, later contradicted by declassified intelligence. But it was enough to set in motion one of the most tragic foreign policy spirals in American history.
Latin America has its own ledger of U.S. “assistance” missions that somehow became long term entanglements. In the Dominican Republic in 1965, we were told that U.S. troops were needed to prevent Communist infiltration, a justification later acknowledged as far more speculative than advertised. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, covert operations justified by “national security” became proxy wars with staggering human costs. Even when U.S. involvement didn’t escalate into full conflict, the credibility damage lasted decades.
When officials insist that the situation in Venezuela is uniquely urgent, historically unprecedented, or strategically unavoidable, Americans can reach back through an entire century of interventions that began exactly this way.
The “Narco State” Frame Is Too Convenient
Does Venezuela have corruption? Absolutely. Does drug trafficking occur in the region? Of course. But the claim that Maduro’s regime represents an immediate threat to American national security is a stretch in the extreme, and that stretch matters. Because every unnecessary war begins with a stretch. Framing Venezuela as a “narco state” is not purely analytical; it is political. It collapses complex regional dynamics into a single villain. It primes the American public for force. And it provides an all purpose justification for a military operation whose actual strategic objectives remain suspiciously vague.
It also distracts from the strategic elephant in the room: oil. Venezuela has some of the largest proven petroleum reserves on the planet, a fact no Pentagon planner ever forgets. When the administration insists that this is only about drugs, Americans have every right to raise an eyebrow.
The Legal and Constitutional Alarm Bells Are Ringing
The United States has not declared war since 1942. Everything since then, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, was justified under elastic interpretations of presidential power. That elasticity has become, over time, a dangerous rubber band. It stretches, and stretches, and stretches until one day it snaps.
Launching strikes against another sovereign state on the grounds of drug trafficking, without congressional authorization, would be another stretch. A vast one.
Under international law, drug smuggling does not constitute an “armed attack” permitting self defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. The War Powers Resolution requires meaningful congressional oversight for any significant military engagement. And the American public, repeatedly misled on matters of war, has earned the right to expect something more than a press conference and a classified briefing.
The question isn’t simply whether the administration can legally justify intervention. It’s whether it can do so without further eroding the already fragile checks that prevent presidents from unilaterally dragging the country into yet another conflict.
Americans Are No Longer Easy Marks
There is a reason Bush’s fumbled proverb has endured. Not just because it was funny, but because it was true. Americans aren’t naive anymore when it comes to foreign adventures. They are war literate. They have lived through two decades of conflict driven budgets, veterans struggling with injuries and trauma, destabilized regions, and massive national debts.
They know what it looks like when the rationale for war is reverse engineered from the desire to strike. They know what it feels like to be told there’s no choice, only to learn, years later, that there were dozens of choices, all ignored. And they know that once missiles fly, Washington’s “limited mission” tends to grow tentacles.
A Smarter Path Forward
If drug trafficking truly threatens American communities, the solution lies in intelligence cooperation, economic pressure, cross border law enforcement, and deep regional diplomacy, not in hammer fist militarism. No naval blockade ever stopped a continental supply chain. No airstrike ever solved a corruption problem. No war ever cured addiction.
The United States has extraordinary leverage in Latin America, but history shows that the quickest way to lose influence is to reach too fast for the gun.
Americas Have Reached their Limit
If the administration believes the American people will accept another conflict built on speculative threats, vague intelligence, and patriotic exhortation, it misunderstands the moment. Iraq shattered the presumption of trust. The Cold War interventions broke the presumption of benevolence. Vietnam destroyed the presumption of competence.
The American public has learned, painfully, and expensively, that war is not a policy tool but a national trauma. Which brings us back to the most unexpectedly prophetic line of George W. Bush’s presidency: “You can’t get fooled again.”
It was meant as a joke, a stumble, a flubbed one liner. It may yet be remembered as a warning.
Because this time, as warships circle Venezuela and officials start preparing their PowerPoints, Americans see what’s coming. The pattern is too familiar, the pitch too rehearsed, the threat too conveniently framed.
And the American people, tired, wary, skeptical, wiser, are ready to say no. No more wars of choice. No more stretched legal justifications. No more interventions wrapped in moral language but rooted in opaque strategy.
No more being fooled.
– Idris B. Odunewu is an executive editor at Use Our Intel, covering security, technology, governance, and global health.
