Why Kill Hugo Chavez?

The reason is simple. Tar sand.

If one counts the known reserves of light and heavy crude oil, Saudi Arabia has the most oil, followed by Russia, Iraq, Iran, and so on. But, if one counts the known reserves of extra-heavy crude — sometimes called tar sand, oil sand, bituminous sand, or non-conventional oil — Venezuela has the most oil.

Tar sand is a mixture of bitumen, clay or sand, and water. Bitumen and extra-heavy oil are types of petroleum which have been degraded by bacteria and other contaminants. Collecting extra-heavy oil is more like strip-mining than drilling, but squeezing the oil out of tar sand is very expensive. So recovering oil from tar sands is only economically feasible when the price of oil is high. And rumor has it the price of oil has been high lately.

Northern Canada also has huge reserves of oil sands; but they’re frozen, making them even more expensive to process. (Although as a friend of mine pointed out, they may not be frozen much longer.) The oil sands of Venezuela are much warmer and friendlier all the way around.

Hugo Chavez has been promoting a stable oil price of $50 a barrel — higher than the old $40 price but lower than the current price of $70. With oil at $50 a barrel, sustained processing of oil sands is possible. Even if you don’t believe that today’s leading oil producers have passed peak production, they’re going to sooner or later. Sooner or later, if we remain hooked on oil, we’ll be sucking it out of the sand in Venezuela.

Marion Gordon (Pat) Robertson claims that Venezuela has nuclear weapons and is planning to attack the United States. Venezuela has somehow managed to steal our tar sand and is on the verge of becoming the most important oil-producing nation on earth for decades to come. The evidence is clear. Chavez must be a Marxist terrorist.

There is another reason to kill Chavez; he has been cooperating with Fidel Castro. That alone is enough to convince many people of Chavez’s treachery, but the damning details still warrant close attention. For example, Cuba and Venezuela have been generating international pressure to bring 78-year-old Luis Posada Carriles to trial sometime before he dies. Long ago, Carriles received military training at Fort Benning in Georgia. As a U.S. intelligence asset, Carriles was the man behind the 1976 terrorist attack which brought down a Cuban airliner, killing everyone on board. Carriles is in the United States; the U.S. has refused to extradite him; and he is seeking political asylum here. Obviously, we cannot permit any foreign country, especially Cuba, to put one of our assets on trial for mass murder. Therefore, Chavez is a terrorist; and we must defend ourselves.

The most insidious Cuban-Venezuelan conspiracy, however, is so dark and malevolent that even Chavez’s worst critics are loathe to mention it. Through Operation Miracle, Venezuela has been flying poor people with cataracts from Latin American countries to Cuba for surgery to improve or restore their sight. Venezuela pays for the surgery and the transportation. Worse, Chavez wants to expand the operation into the United States and Africa, so that poor people who suffer from cataracts can have free surgery.

Chavez is obviously a madman who must be stopped. It may become necessary for us to discover that Osama bin Laden is hiding in Venezuela, if that’s what it takes to create public support for the occupation of Caracas.


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Civil War in Iraq? Mission Accomplished!

William F. Buckley, Jr., editor at large for the far-right National Review, has declared defeat. “One can’t doubt,” he wrote on 2/24/2006, “that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” According to Buckley, the Bush administration operated on the assumptions that Iraqis would transcend their differences, cooperate to end insurgent violence, and pursue a society with religious freedom. But that hasn’t happened. And Mr. Bush, as “military leaders” are sometimes compelled to do, must “acknowledge a tactical setback, but…insist on the survival of strategic policies…And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.”

Despite the troubles in Iraq, the administration:

can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia…

In Buckley’s estimation, it would be better for Americans to concede defeat in Iraq than to abandon the principles which impelled us. “The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.”

These claims, coming from a former C.I.A. operative who worked to undermine the Mexican government in the early 1950s, have no credibility.

By Buckley’s own account, he spent a year working under Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., one of the worst of the worst. Hunt is most famous for his Watergate caper with fellow C.I.A. officer James McCord against Richard Nixon, but Hunt has a lot of other dubious achievements. He was propaganda officer for the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the 1961 invasion of Cuba. In the mid-1980s, he sued Spotlight magazine over an article about his alleged involvement in some unpleasantness in Dallas, Texas — and lost. I’m not trying to convict Buckley by association. I’m merely noting that whatever he learned from Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. couldn’t be good.

And that makes me question Buckley’s concern for his metaphorical shrine to American idealism. What ideals does he have in mind? Toppling legitimate foreign leaders to replace them with thugs? Rigging elections? Building a better plutocracy? Raising mercenary armies and paying them with drug money? In the name of freedom and democracy, the U.S. has worked tirelessly against freedom and democracy in Latin America and elsewhere. We always have high-sounding excuses for supporting tyrants and butchers.

Buckley thinks we must preserve the “strategic policies” behind our invasion of Iraq. He doesn’t say what those policies might be, perhaps because they are insufficiently uplifting. The terrible reality is that we have no exit strategy for Iraq because we don’t plan on leaving. (Why else are we building permanent bases there?) If the United States converted to renewable energy sources tomorrow, the neo-cons would still press for occupation of Iraq, with an eye on Iran. Modern armies run on oil, and the neo-cons anticipate a lot of wars in the future. They want their hands on the oil spigot to thwart future adversaries — like Europe and China.


When we were defeated in Vietnam, some commentators lamented that our noble cause had gone tragically awry. But it was never a noble cause; it was a war built on lies from the very beginning — just as the invasion of Iraq was the bastard child of government deceit. The idea that civil war in Iraq represents a failure of U.S. policy presumes that the U.S. wants stability. Is there any reason to believe that?

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