How Hugo Chavez botched the Arab Spring

[Peace Patriot]

3. I didn't realize, til the end of the article, that this tripe was written by Nicholas Kozloff...

...or I wouldn't have bothered to puzzle through it.

Kozloff is one of these flabby-brained, Christian Science Monitor-type "liberals" who hate Hugo Chavez almost more than the CIA and Exxon Mobil do, and despise and revile the leftist democracy revolution that Chavez and the Venezuelan people pioneered in Latin America.

Kozloff has been trying to degrade and demonize Chavez in every article he's written about it. He must be pissing in his pants that Chavez won re-election and that even people here are beginning to grasp the "Big Lie' techniques that have been used to disinform us about Chavez and Venezuela. This particular Kozlov crapola has a "sour grapes" feel to it, as well as being ... how to describe it?... confused and even crazy.

We are now to believe that Kozloff actually likes Chavez and that, if only Chavez hadn't "botched the Arab Spring," he would be a great leader of the third world and there would be women's liberation and all these other wonderful democratic things in Arabia?

Understand, first of all, that Kozloff speaks for the global corporatists and war profiteers whom he has served in his long, flatulent, nasty hit pieces in the New York Slimes and other publications about Chavez and other leaders of the Latin American left. But--a lot like the Slimes--he coats his service to these interests with a sort of pink slime of liberalism and fake journalism. Here, I think he has several objectives: to slime Chavez again (as retribution for his re-election), to damage Latin America's influence in the "global south" movement, and to deflect attention from U.S. covert operations in the so-called "Arab Spring."

The irony of the article (and its headline) is that it is the U.S. that "botched the Arab Spring" because democracy in the Middle East and North Africa was never the U.S goal. Installing puppet leaders is the U.S. goal. Gaddafi and Assad asserted the sovereignty of their countries. They were/are not U.S. puppets. That is their only real crime in the U.S. government's view. Everything else is bullshit. The U.S. government gladly supports dictators and gross violators of human rights when it suits them, and itself commits mass murder, torture, weapons trafficking and all sorts of crimes, and, believe me, those crimes did not cease with the end of the Bush Junta. Drone bombings--targeting people around the world for execution without trial, and not being too fussy about "collateral damage"--have been added to the U.S. crime sheet since the Bush Junta.

The U.S. is involved in all sorts of covert ops around these so-called "liberation" movements in the Middle East/North Africa--either instigating them or inflltrating them, and, in several cases, arming them (with catastrophic results in Syria). The CIA is assassinating leaders it doesn't like and promoting those whom it can control. And the U.S. doesn't give a goddamn how these conflicts turn out, as long as the U.S. has a chokehold on whoever ends up on top. You think the U.S. wants democracy in the Middle East? Look at Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the U.A.E.! THAT is who and what the U.S. supports in the Middle East--greedy sultans and absolute tyrants.

The CIA has been doing this sort of shit forever. They would like us to forget they OVERTURNED DEMOCRACY in Iran in 1954 and inflicted that country with 25 years of torture, brutal repression and vast corruption. Why did they overturn Iran's first elected president? Because he asserted Iran's sovereignty when he nationalized the oil!

Repeat x 1,000--in the Middle East AND in Latin America! The U.S. goals in both regions have been, a) control, or, b) chaos, in the interest of eventually achieving control.

And I'm sure that it pisses off the moguls of the "military-industrial complex" no end that they can no longer bully Latin America into playing along with their dirty, bloody games in the rest of the world. And they can thank their Supreme Count/Diebold-intalled Bush Junta for that! After a half a century of bloody interference by the U.S. in Latin America, capped by the Bush Junta, Latin Americans have HAD IT with the U.S. and have, finally, begun to devise their own counter-strategy, which has two main planks: 1) defense of the sovereignty of targeted countries, and 2) "south-south" cooperation and having each other's backs.

This LatAm counter-strategy began with the Venezuelan peoples' resistance to the BUSH-SUPPORTED rightwing coup d'etat attempt in 2002--and has included, for instance, successful regional resistance to a U.S./Bush Junta coup d'etat attempt in Bolivia in 2008, and the formation of USASUR and CELAC (LatAm alternatives to the U.S.-dominated OAS)--and is now being extended across the global south, for instance, with Venezuela's and Brazil's defiance of the U.S. on Iran. It also, quite importantly, involves trade deals and other sorts of interaction between and among the countries that the U.S. has looted and ravaged or has targeted for looting and ravaging.

And, of course, Venezuela, where the leftist democracy revolution first occurred--and where U.S. interference was first turned back--is one of the key architects of this counter-strategy, first of all at home, in Latin America, and then extending worldwide to other regions where the U.S. seeks domination of resources and governments--the Middle East, Africa, Asia. This counter-strategy involves trade deals with targeted countries outside of Latin America and also political support for sovereignty. Venezuela, Brazil and other key leaders of this strategy do NOT interfere in countries like Iran, Libya or Syria, the way the U.S. does, sneakily and bloodily seeking puppet leaders. They defend sovereignty and independence, in whatever ways they can, and in whatever forums, and seek partners--equals--in a multi-lateral world. They do NOT dictate forms of government, laws, economic systems or anything else.

The U.S. and its transglobal corporate rulers and war profiteers above all want to destroy national sovereignty in targeted countries--the ability of the country to make its own laws, conduct trade in its own interest and control its own resources in the interest of its people. We saw this in its rawest form in Iraq--first invasion, then forcing the U.S. installed puppet government to sign U.S.-written oil contracts. They've done it (tried to destroy sovereignty) through ruinous World Bank/IMF "loans" and the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin America and other regions. They've done it directly through invasion in Iraq. They've done it through covert ops, sabotage, "sanctions" and other dirty rotten means.

That is why Venezuela, Brazil and others are supporting Iran, for instance. They aren't supporting the mullahs. They are supporting Iran's sovereignty. Iran's current government is the most legitimate government they've had since the U.S. destroyed their secular democracy back in 1954. Cuba is a similar case. Cuba's current government is the most legitimate government they've ever had, and is most certainly 100% better than the horror of the bloody U.S.-BACKED Batista dictatorship in the 1950s. Now all of Latin America supports Cuban sovereignty against U.S. "sanctions" and other bullshit--even rightwing LatAm governments. It is virtually unanimous and it is not support for "communism"; it is support of Cuba's sovereignty--its right to form its own government, make its own laws and control its own resources, without being dictated to by the U.S. government and ravaged by U.S.-based transglobal corporate rulers and war profiteers.

Kozloff's article is COVER for the supremely anti-democratic activities of the U.S. in the Middle East and around the world. Blame the failure of the "Arab Spring" on...Chavez?!?!?

That is ridiculous.