U.S. Plans for Military Conflict With Venezuela?

To call Venezuela a "rogue" nation, a retro-label usually reserved for the worst lawless regimes, is both lazy and small minded.

Yesterday he elaborated:

I have been asked to identify the document that specifically identified Venezuela: It is an internal military briefing titled "The FY08-13 POM" and dated October 2005. POM stands for Program Objective Memorandum. According to the Defense Department, the POM is the primary document used by the services to submit programming proposals, analyze missions and justify allocation of resources.

Is it possible that the characterization of Venezuela as a "pop up" threat and as a "rogue" state will turn into nothing? That this is just the work of over-zealous or opportunistic or lazy staff officers looking to justify their existence, their budgets, and their proposals? It is possible. That is why I wrote about the thoughtless inclusion of Venezuela in war planning in the first place: to make the point that such floundering about for new threats, and such opportunism, demands the intervention of cooler heads.

As good as this is for someone employed by the Washington Post, a reader signing his comment as Gray had this to say to Arkin's original article:

This column by Arkin is better than the onesided spin he tells us about Iraq's WMDs, but still he starts it with a very misleading statement:

"Relations between the U.S. and Venezuela have deteriorated steadily since President Hugo Chavez, an anti-imperial populist, was elected in December 1998."

This is creating an image that it was Chavez election that was the reason for the deteriorating relationship. This isn't true. A simple Google search for 'Clinton Chavez 1999' produces several evidences to the contrary, like this quote from Bill Clinton in early 1999: "I was tremendously impressed by his [Chavez] evident commitment to the use of democratic and constitutional methods to achieve the institutional reforms that the people of Venezuela clearly want."

The truth is, the relations between Venezuela and the US became problematic after January 20, 2001. The reason behind this is the openly hostile position of the Bush administration towards Chavez socialistic ('bolivarian') tendencies. Bush's policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich, is a right-wing Cuban-American, who isn't exactly known for a liberal attitude towards leftist policy, democratically elected or not.

This hostility reached the state of crisis in April 2002 when a group of Venzuelan officers tried to overturn the elected administration with military force. The US immediately acknoledged the rebels as the legitimate government of Venezuela. The degree of the US involvement in this coup is still a controversy, but it is a fact that there had been talks with the rebels and that US Navy ships were having a 'maneuver' at the venezuelan coast. The coup eventually became a failure because of public opposition, and so it comes as no big surprise that Chavez is very critical of the US intentions in Latin America since this experience.

Is it sloppy investigation or intentional spin that made Arkin omit this important fact from his column? You decide.