A blogger at Orange Juice wonders:
It looks like Mr. Chavez is trying to prepare himself and South America for a possible war with the U.S. and other countries. I sure hope the U.S. is paying attention to this.
Your thoughts?
However much of a tyrant Hugo Chavez may be in Venezuela, he’s not stupid enough to attack Colombia, even less so the U.S. If he just sticks to his own country, he’s safe. The U.S. military has shown itself particularly inept at invading Third World countries, as we see in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush regime, and the military with it, just don’t get Fourth Generation Warfare.
But an attack by Chavez on Colombia would be different. It would be old-fashioned Second Generation (attrition) warfare. It would bring to the fore the immense advantages enjoyed by the U.S. military and its allies: intelligence and logistics. U.S. spy satellites would tell Colombia’s military where Chavez’s forces were. Chavez would be unlikely to get such info from anyone else. Russia and China wouldn’t want to offend the U.S. Commercial satellite and photos now can be bought, but you have to know how to interpret them.
So the moment they got into a foreign country — Colombia — Chavez’ forces would be decimated. That’s how dictators lose their perches.
Ecuador won’t mess with the U.S.
Chavez will remain a pest, but nothing bigger. His flirtation with Castro is meaningless. Castro will be dead soon. After that, Cuba will become a suburb of Miami and we’ll finally get legal Cohibas.
Chavez’s whole Che Guevara schtick is meaningless without the Soviets to back it up. And the Soviet Union has been extinct for 16 years.
We Yanks shouldn’t get get so excited about this stuff. Just bring our troops home from everywhere, including from Colombia, cut our taxes, and let the foreigners take care of themselves. Let’s mind our own business for once as the Founding Fathers advised.
By the way, Chavez only has so much power because oil prices are over $100 a barrel. And whose fault is that? Why, it’s Bush-Greenspan-Bernake’s inflation that has debased the value of the dollar, giving great benefit to commodities-rich countries, such as Venezuela (at least for a while).
Stop the inflation and go back to the gold standard and not only will Chavez be cut down to size — his economy would suffer and he’d get the blame — but the U.S. recession would end.
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