Tastes great? or less filling?
Chavez has always been one of those nationalists for whom there can never be full expression of their national and personal glory while the US sits on its throne. Hence his reflexive need to team up with every anti-US, anti-West force he can find. It isn't enough to lead Venezuela to prosperity if it leaves the US still free to operate in the hemisphere.
If Chavez destroys Venezuela in the process, it is a price worth paying for the greater good, at least in Chavez's calculation.
The article states that we hesitate to move against him because of his control of vast oil reserves, but that is typical journalistic mental-shorthand. He can't cut us off. Oil being fungible, it doesn’t matter who he sells to. And he has to sell.
Furthermore, Venezuela is heavily invested in the US, owning three large refineries and a chain of gas stations.
The problem is that they have wrecked their oil industry by sins of omission and commission alike. Earlier, when they were able to pump their full quota, they called for production cuts while playing games to hide the fact that they were not cutting production themselves. Now that they have wrecked their industry and can't pump as much, they are calling for cuts in hopes that the others will cut production and, in so doing, help them to maximize profit on their reduced production. The others will promise to do it, but won't follow through.
OPEC's best hope is to keep production down by attacking pipelines in Colombia and Iraq, as you point out, and by setting environmental groups to harry and obstruct pipeline projects in Ecuador, and Bolivia, and the Caspian. You will never see an environmental group suing to stop a pipeline project in Venezuela, or Saudi Arabia, or Russia either for that matter. China is looking to build a mega pipeline of its own, but while it must surely endanger some kind of high desert rodent the environmentalists will not sue to shut it down either.
The fact that certain OPEC nations have turned to war as an extension of trade policy makes them, in effect, guilty of piracy. They are pirate nations. The NGOs, environmental and otherwise, whose mass demonstrations and lawsuits have the same effect of stopping competing oil sources from coming on stream, are effectively allied with OPEC although they would never say so aloud.
This is the way war is fought in the 21st Century. Guerrillas, lawyers in three-piece suits, environmentalists, peasant demonstrators blocking roads, student rioters, all coordinate to concentrate control of energy sources in anti-Western hands. Whether their motives are purely commercial, I doubt, but that their war against the West has a very commercial advantage is undeniable. But it is an advantage only if you are fundamentally anti-West.
That a Wahab or Shia cleric would be an anti-West reactionary is no surprise. The surprise is the strange amalgam of Marxism and distorted nationalism that has led Chavez into their camp. He's deranged, of course. But when millions share your psychosis, its a religion.
Bump!