Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has been in the US news recently with his defiance of Bush in Buenos Aires. Given Bush's belief that foreign leaders should grovel in his presence, his experience last week may give him an even more alarmist view of the Venezuelan "menace".
We don't have trouble enough in the world, it seems, with Iraq, international jihadists and all the rest. Hey, why not escalate a confrontation with the elected government of Venezuela, one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world, and see where that takes us?
Some people are thinking about the possibilities, anyway: Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivarian Socialism, and Asymmetric Warfare by Max G. Manwaring (US Army Strategic Studies Institute; Oct 2005). The most generous interpretation I would put on this paper is that it outlines some of the considerations that the US military would need to take into consideration if Venezuela should be perceived as an increasing threat to American security.
According to the foreword, the Bush administration already perceives Venezuela as a threat:
This monograph comes at a time when the U.S. and Venezuelan governments are intensifying an ongoing series of acrimonious charges and countercharges. Each country has argued repeatedly that the other is engaged in a political-economic-military struggle for Western Hemisphere hegemony. On a more personal level, the United States maintains that President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is playing a destabilizing role in the region, and is compromising the quality of democracy and the exercise of power in Venezuela and other parts of the Americas. Chávez rebuts that the only destabilizing factor in the hemisphere is President George W. Bush, and that democracy and power long since have been perverted by American capitalists and local elites for their own purposes. And the U.S.-Venezuelan verbal sparing match continues unabated.
A less generous interpretation would be that Manwaring is outlining a propaganda case to justify making Venezuela the target of US destabilization attempts. After all, the Bush administration connived at the failed 2002 coup against Chávez, a fact which Manwaring neglects to discuss. He also fails to explain the role of the state-owned oil company and how it had been used to benefit mostly the wealthiest Venezuelans. Or how the Venezuelan elite had catered to American oil companies in a way that Chávez' government does not.
I suppose it could be that none of those latter considerations weigh very heavily on the Bush administration. It could be that that George Bush and Dick Cheney, the Dark Lord of American torture, are terribly tormented by possible violations of human rights that may have occurred in Venezuela. And if they haven't occurred, it's possible that Chávez has the intent to someday do something that might violate somebody's human rights.
Manwaring certainly goes out of his way to associate Chávez with some scary-sounding things. He makes very little effort to explain what the Venezuelan government is actually doing that the US needs to view it as such a serious security threat. But under the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, a country doesn't have to actually threaten the US in any way to be the target of invasion or regime change by other methods. Bush and Cheney and Rummy just need to decide the government should be taken out, and the public's job is to cheer, "Yee-haw! We're killin' foreigners! That's what makes America great!"
But, to be fair Manwaring does talk some about the menacing aspect of the Chávez government. For instance:
...President Chávez is spending large amounts of money on an amorphous Plan Bolívar 2000 that builds and renovates schools,clinics, day nurseries, roads, and housing for the poor. Additionally,Chávez is developing education and literacy outreach programs, agrarian reform programs, and workers’ cooperatives. At the same time, he has established MERCAL, a state company that provides subsidized staple foodstuffs to the poor. Chávez also has imported 16,000 Cuban doctors to help take care of the medical needs of the Venezuelan underclasses. Clearly, these programs offer tangible benefits to the mass of Venezuelans who were generally neglectedby previous governments.
I suppose to a good loyal Republican, this sounds like the horror of horrors. That government is actually taking some of its oil revenue and spending it to make life better and open opportunities for its working people!
Now, from what I've seen about Chávez, I could be persuaded that his use of public media may not be the best approach for a democratic government. But Manwaring's description was striking, not only for its heavy propagandistic framing but also because part of the description sounds so familiar:
The intent, in this effort, is to fabricate mass consensus. Bolivarianismo [Chávez' political ideology] will require maximum media (radio, TV, and newspapers/magazines) support to purvey ideas, develop public opinion, and generate electoral successes. Ample evidence exists that Chávez-controlled media are using emotional arguments to gain attention, exploit real and imagined fears of the population and create outside enemies as scapegoats for internal failings, and to inculcate the notion that opposition to the regime equates to betrayal of the country. (my emphasis)
Substitute "FOX News" for "Chávez-controlled media" and that could describe how Republican-dominated media function in this country. I'm not trying to see all this through the prism of internal American politics. But it is really striking that Manwaring describes something that is so reminiscent of the Bush administration's approach to governance as being so obviously threatening to democracy - in Venezuela.
I can't judge how close his sweeping judgment comes to accuracy. But his silences in this case are loud. His readers could easily assume that Chávez controlled virtually every media outlet in Venezuela, and that is very far from the case. In fact, the leading private newspapers there have been highly critical of Chávez and his government.
Manwaring's description of Venzuela's military is also striking. Especially since he has described how the Venezuelan military has a long history of intervening against democratically-elected governments. Chávez himself led an attempted coup in 1992, one factor that makes me think he's not necessarily a 100% committed democrat today.
First, the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999 provides political and institutional autonomy for the armed forces, under the centralized control of the president and commander-inchief. President Chávez has also created an independent National Police Force, outside the traditional control of the armed forces, which is responsible to the president. At the same time, efforts have gone forward to establish a 1.5 million-person military reserve and two additional paramilitary organizations—the Frente Bolivariano de Liberación (Bolivarian Liberation Front) and the Ejército del Pueblo en Armas (Army of the People in Arms). The armed forces and the police perform traditional national defense and internal security missions, within the context of preparing for what Chávez calls fourth-generation, asymmetric, irregular conflict, or war of all the people. The military reserve and the paramilitary are charged to (1) protect the country from a U.S. and/or Colombian invasion, or resist such an invasion with an Iraqi-style insurgency; and (2) act as armed, anti-opposition forces. The institutional separation of the various security organizations ensures that no one institution can control the others, but the centralization of those institutions under the President ensures his absolute control of security and “social harmony” in Venezuela.
Again, I can't make authoritative comparisons of Venezuela's command system with similar countries. But the country has an elected parliament. The implication in the last sentence that Chávez somehow exercises sole control over the military is highly questionable. How is their system different than the authority given to the American President by the Constitution to be the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces during wartime? Manwaring fails to enlighten us on the subject. He also writes:
What he has accomplished by reorganizing the security apparatus of the Venezuelan state is to gain complete control of that apparatus; preclude any political independence, influence, or power it may have had; and give himself instruments of power that he can wield along with others who can make Venezuela a regional power.
Apart from the polemical phrasing, what Manwaring describes here is civilian control of the military. How is that bad? That principle is basic to democracy. It certainly is no guarantee against military misconduct abroad. The Nazi Party in Germany also exercised civilian authority over the military, unlike the militarist form of government in Japan at that time. Both had aggressive foreign and military policies.
A lot of the rest of the piece seems to be aimed at superficially associating Chávez with bad stuff. Here are some examples:
Following the logic of the former leader of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, Abmael Guzman, Chávez has identified the lack of legitimacy of all governments since the Spanish conquest as the center of gravity in the ongoing conflict in Latin America.
If there is any shred of evidence that Hugo Chávez is attempting to emulate Guzman and the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), Manwaring fails to point us to it. Sendero Luminoso (remnants of which I believe still exist) was a particularly savage Peruvian guerrilla group which modeled itself on the ideology of the Chinese "Gang of Four" and admired the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. The comparison looks entirely polemical and groundless to me. But he makes reference to the Sendero Luminoso several times in the paper, such as:
Accordingly,all of the above types of threats are seen as methods of choice - or areas for exploitation - for various commercial (narco-traffickers and organized criminals), ideological (insurgencies such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso) movements, and caudillos like Chávez who are completely and ruthlessly dedicated to achieving control or radical change in a given nation-state.
But other than such bare assertions, Manwaring fails to show why we should believe his extravagant claims about the menacing nature of the Venezuelan regime. There are abundant references to the supposedly sinister nature of Hugo Chávez and his political movement: that they aim to create a Super Insurgency throughout Latin America; that Venezuela has for two centuries or so operated under a Robespierrian notion of the state as the expression of the General Will; Chávez is a "demagogic populist" and a "caudilloistic" populist; good solid (read: affluent) citizens of Venezuela "see him replacing democracy with autocracy and a mildly socialistic economy with something close to Marxist-Leninist communism"; and on and on.
The closest he comes to describing an actual threat is when he talks about how Chávez is organizing his country to be able to wage guerrilla war, if necessary. The following is a good example of Manwaring's polemical technique. He cites a news report that Chávez in 2004:
... directed the armed forces to develop a new military doctrine for contemporary conflict: “I call upon everybody to start an . . . effort to apprehend . . . the ideas, concepts, and doctrine of asymmetric war [i.e., guerrilla warfare].”
This may well be an undesirable development from the American viewpoint. But it also seems to be an entirely rational response by a leader who two years previously had been the target of a US-backed military coup, in which the Aznar government of Spain also played a role. And the Iraq War had shown that the US could easily crush an army like Iraq's or Venezuela's, but was not able to win the guerrilla war that followed the occupation of Iraq.
But Manwaring introduces that brief report with a much more far-reaching statement that invites the reader to associate it with sinister international aggression:
Additionally, it is important to note that this second level of analysis would include proxies or surrogates of other countries. Many of the “Wars of National Liberation” and “People’s Wars” that were fought all over the world during the so-called Cold War are good examples of this phenomenon.
But for all the atmospheric huffing and puffing, the only foreign policy actions by the Chávez government that he describes that might be considered threatening in some way are that Venezuela has good relations with Cuba (as Mexico always had and even Spain under Franco had), and that Chávez is sympathetic to reformist democrats in Bolivia. That's pretty much it.
Are Chávez and his Bolivarian ideas part of a new wave of democratic and social reform with wider appeal in Latin America? Will they become a new incarnation of authoritarian populism like Peronism? Will Venezuela, as Manwaring would evidently have us believe, start trying to subvert Latin American governments all over the place? There's very little in his paper to allow the reader to make sensible judgments about any of that.
The main value of the paper seems to be that it gives us a glimpse of the kind of ideological framework that the Bush administration, or a future administration, might well use to justify a more aggressive American policy toward Venezuela. After the lies and frauds that were used to justify the Iraq War, the public would be well advised to look very closely at the next war, or attempted "regime change" without direct US intervention, that the Bush crew tries to sell us.
But Venezuela can't be too concerned about an Iraq-style invasion by the US anytime in the immediate future. Unless the Republicans embrace the idea of a draft and expand the Army in a major way, the United States simply doesn't have the military resources to pull such a thing off.
In fact, we haven't yet been able to make the "Iraq-style invasion" succeed in Iraq.
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