Chavez Wins, Bush Loses (Again)! Now What? (Venezuela)

[bemildred]

Nice analysis in context. Lot's more than this little snippet.

In each confrontation, Washington burned a strategic client group in its bid to grab state power in the shortest time. Washington rejected a gradualist insider political strategy of accumulating forces over time, modifying legislation through negotiations, exploring real or imagined grievances and tempering the demagogic rhetoric embedded in its foreign policy.

The basic question is: why did Washington persist in its go-for-broke policies despite a sequence of defeats?

Between 2001-2002, the ideologues of multiple wars, under the guise of anti-terrorism and the slogan "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists" (Bush, September 23, 2001), were determined to make short shrift of the Chavez regime. The reason was that President Chavez was one of the very few non-communist regimes to oppose the US war against Afghanistan and condemn US terror (Chavez stated "You can't fight terror with terror.").

Given that mad-dog fanatics controlled power in Washington as early as October 2001, a US State Department official (Grossman) threatened Chavez that "He and future generations (of Venezuelans) would pay" for opposing US aggression. Along with US Ambassador Charles Shapiro, the neo-conservatives, especially the Cuban-Americans in the State Department who designed Latin American policies, overestimated their influence in the Venezuelan military and exaggerated the power of the mass media and the business elite in shaping the outcome of a military coup. The precipitate action was due to the upcoming invasion of Iraq and the obsessive need to silence foreign governmental opposition -- given the mass opposition in the US and Europe to a war against Iraq.

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