Trump has had Venezuela in his crosshairs for a while, and late Friday night he conducted a huge military operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicholás Maduro, and his wife.

Most people agree that Maduro is a bad person and should not be in charge of anything. A simple look at his Wikipedia page is pretty condemning. However, did the US have proper justification to get involved with this? Why did we send our own troops on the ground and in the field of danger to unseat him?

Let’s start at the beginning, with the misinformation around fentanyl. All of the intelligence we have claims that fentanyl primarily comes from cartels in Mexico using ingredients supplied by China and India. If Trump wanted to go through the proper legal route of asking Congress to declare war on the cartels in Mexico, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Please, yes, get it off our streets.

Instead, we have decided with no public evidence that the cartels transporting fentanyl are now Venezuelan and we have begun dropping bombs on tiny fishing boats that would have had to stop between 6-20 times in unsafe areas to refuel before they could even reach the US, if they were even actually transporting drugs.

“Trust the government because they likely have evidence we haven’t seen of this large-scale drug trafficking”. Absolutely not. Our government has not been shown to have a track record worth trusting. I’d need to see proof of something this big before giving any support. Did we learn nothing from the weapons of mass destruction (aka the lack thereof) in Iraq?

Also about the boat strikes, they are extremely illegal under international law and considered to be a war crime because it’s considered an extrajudicial killing, which means that there was no due process of law. We didn’t search the boat for drugs and then arrest the offenders and give them a lawyer and a courtroom. We just destroyed their boat and killed most of the people aboard without any of that.

This could be overlooked if we were in a war with Venezuela because wartime rules are different, but it’s Congress who declares war, NOT the Executive Branch, which includes the president and Secretary of War. As of now, Congress has not declared war against Venezuela. Which also makes everything the Trump administration has done in Venezuela extremely illegal.

A few weeks ago, Trump signed an executive order declaring fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. I was initially extremely supportive of this and thought that this would be his way of getting more funding to local police departments to deal with the opioid epidemic, but then I looked at the wording of the executive order and realized that it was just authorizing the Department of War to use more force against foreign countries accused of trafficking fentanyl.

If our government considered fentanyl to be a weapon of mass destruction, and we positioned the public to believe that Venezuela is in possession of these weapons of mass destruction and used that as justification to invade, then we would be recreating the Iraq War only twenty years later.

But this, again, is out of the Executive branch’s jurisdiction and is something that should have been passed by Congress. No president is supposed to have this much power. A lot of the Executive Orders passed during this term actually overreach the power that presidents should have, but our Congress has, for the most part, looked away.

My main point with Venezuela is that if this was really about drugs, we would have done something to Colombia or Mexico. If this was really about replacing an oppressive dictator, we would have done something in North Korea by now. So what is it really about?

Last month, the US began seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, claiming they were full of “stolen oil” and were being used to fund the “narcoterrorist Maduro regime”. We invaded the tankers and took control of them, rerouting them to the gulf coast and sending the oil to our own refineries to use. I won’t comment on the “stolen” part of the accusation because it doesn’t make any sense, but our government bragging about committing piracy is not a great look.

In case you didn’t know, Venezuela is home of the world’s largest supply of proven oil reserves. They have over six times the oil reserves that we do and 100% of their oil is owned by their government. In addition, their military was not very good and their people were deeply unhappy with the Maduro regime. All of this makes them an extremely easy target for a country who wishes to exploit their resources and place their own person in charge.

Thankfully, the Venezuelan people are currently celebrating being freed from Maduro. Time will tell if this is truly cause to celebrate, or if this will be a repeat of the vacuum left in Iraq after we toppled Saddam Hussein, which left the Iraqi citizens in an even worse position than before.

I, for one, would like to see our government put as much effort into helping our own people as they do liberating foreign ones. We do not need to spend our money and energy on starting new wars when the majority of our people can’t afford to go to the doctor anymore. Surely there is a healthy balance somewhere of helping both citizens and foreigners that our government can find.

Taryn Ogletree is a local small business owner and author with previous experience of several years in finance.