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11/05/2005:

"Pentagon to Venezuela: Who, Us?"

11/03/05 "Washington Post" -- -- Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Donald Rumsfeld are like two alcoholics drinking together, pathetically doing the only thing they know how to do, egged on by their presence at the bar.

Yesterday, I wrote that "The Pentagon has begun contingency planning for potential military conflict with Venezuela as part of a broad post-Iraq evaluation of strategic threats to the United States."

According to the Miami Herald, "Pentagon spokesmen Wednesday reacted with deep skepticism to [my report] … that the Department of Defense is drawing up plans for a potential military conflict with Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez."

The Pentagon spokesman needs to do more work.

There is not a doubt that military planners are doing what military planners do: looking at the world through the prism of potential threat, fitting countries to their models of action and reaction, toiling away they think in secret, considering the "what ifs." This is particularly the case after the failure of 9/11. It is particularly true now that the military is mentally moving on from Iraq, looking to the future.

The assumption of outsiders -- including Chavez and many in Latin American -- is that this uniquely American military process is purely imperial: Of course the United States is planning the take down Chavez, they say. It is the history of intervention. It is routine. No country escapes the American bulls-eye.

To insiders like Rumsfeld though, top secret eying of a hostile Venezuela is only prudent. As I said yesterday, Venezuela possesses everything that makes it "strategically" important: it has oil; it is leftist; it is critical of the United States; it is buying from (and threatening to sell to) the bad guys; it is in our own back yard. Strategic may be the most overused word in the international lexicon, but in this case strategically important is assumed to mean military. And military means either ally or threat.
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