Condoleeza Rice
attacked Venezuela and President Chavez sharply in her testimony yesterday. She called Venezuela "very deeply troubling" and suggested that it was a primary concern for the Bush administration.
Get ready for another war because Venezuela is the world's 5th largest oil exporting nation and they are turning off the taps to Bushco's Texas oil friends. The conflict is about to hit boiling point. Venezuela has been phasing out the old oil contracts which allowed Texas oil companies to operate fields and pocket the revenues. Instead they adopted a policy in which Petroleos de Venezuela operates joint ventures in which it has the majority stake with state-owned developers from nations such as Russia and China, posing a direct threat to US dominance of Venezuelan fields.
Venezuela has been using its rapidly escalating oil revenues to introduce universal healthcare, state pensions and social housing for the 80 percent of the population living in poverty. This has made Mr Chavez hugely popular in Venezuela but roundly hated in Texas and Washington.
Even
when pressed, Condoleeza couldn't say anything nice about President Chavez:
She reserved some of her harshest language, not for China or Russia, but for President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose government she said had "not been constructive" because of his tough tactics against the news media and the opposition.
"Is it possible for you to say something positive about the Chávez administration?" Mr. Chafee asked, apparently taken aback at the toughness of her words.
When Ms. Rice said "it's pretty hard, Senator, to find something positive," Mr. Chafee said her attitude "seems disrespectful to the Venezuelan people" who elected Mr. Chávez.
Here's how one might expect Bushco to escalate problems in Venezuela and promote regime change so that his friends in Texas can go back to business as usual:
- Bankroll a coup attempt by US sympathisers using US taxpayer funds;
- Base US Navy ships off the Venezuelan coast to support the coup attempt and redeploy them again now (no cite, but US Navy ships were deployed to Venezuela two weeks ago);
- Use the same Congress-funded cover op which financed the coup to lead a press campaign against Venezuela for charging the coup conspirators in the coup with taking their money;
- Get a friendly neighboring country to bribe Venezuelan military and police into kidnapping a political figure to support charges of harbouring terrorists and creating a major diplomatic dispute;
- Get the Washington Post to write a scary editorial about commies in our backyard who are suppressing dissent, buying weapons from the Russkis, and consorting with Cubans.
I wish I was making all this up. I just connected the dots for myself within the last 2 hours, but it hangs together too well for me not to be
very deeply troubled.