Wanna bet?
Posted on 03/26/2003 2:01:45 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez condemned the United States on Wednesday for "deciding what is good and bad in the world."
"No country, no matter what its name - in this case it's called the United States of America - has the right to decide what is good and bad in the world," Chavez said in a speech to business owners. "No country has the right to do that or to invade a people or bomb a city where there are children, women. For God's sake! Innocent human beings."
His words were met with loud applause and cries of "Peace! Peace!"
Washington has sour relations with the leftist Chavez, who frequently accuses global powers of exploiting poor countries for their own economic interests.
In 2000, Chavez defied the United States by becoming the first head of state to visit Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War. Washington also resents Chavez's friendship with Cuban president Fidel Castro.
It was the second time in a week that Chavez denounced the war. He again urged the United Nations to condemn the strike, saying it "breaks with international order" and risks throwing the world "into a stage of the law of the jungle in which the strongest always imposes itself."
On Tuesday, U.S. Embassy spokesman John Law dismissed Chavez's criticism, insisting the United States its allies were "acting in defense of the interests of the United Nations." Law said toppling Saddam would allow Iraqis to "create a new, prosperous and free country."
On Tuesday, several dozen Venezuelans of Arab origin joined Chavez supporters to protest the war. Downtown Caracas is splattered with graffiti reading, "Bush you will die" and "If the Yankees want bloodshed they will have bloodshed."
Yet most Venezuelans seem dispassionate about the war, consumed by their country's own political troubles, including a recent unsuccessful two-month strike to oust Chavez.
We didn't decide that on our own. A unanimous vote of the Security Council of the UN decided that in November; we just decided that someone had to take action on the vote. Since the UN didn't seem to have to guts to do it, we and some of our allies decided to do it ourselves.
Readers of the New York Times, The Washington Post and of the Associated Press, and viewers of CNN, are fed a dramatically different story. There is an enormous divide between what the world is hearing about Venezuela and what is really happening there. Reporters have so controlled the flow of information and disfigured the truth that their coverage of Venezuela is a caricature of what conservative critics call the "liberal media bias." What we are seeing in media coverage of Venezuela is not liberal bias, but totalitarian bias.
From Venezuela, A Counterplot*** As Washington prepares a high-stakes military venture in the Persian Gulf, a growing physical threat is being posed by Iraq, Libya and Iran to the soft underbelly of the United States. Hundreds and possibly thousands of agents from rogue Arab nations are working hard to help President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela take control of South America's largest oil industry and create al-Qaeda-friendly terrorist bases just two hours' flying time from Miami.
Arab advisers now are reinforcing a sizable contingent of Cubans in efforts to reorganize Venezuela's security services, assimilate its industries based on totalitarian models and repress a popular opposition movement. "What happens in Venezuela may affect how you fight a war in Iraq," Gen. James Hill of U.S. Southern Command is reported recently to have told his colleague at U.S. Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks.
"Chavez is planning to coordinate an anti-American strategy with terrorist states," says Venezuela's former ambassador to Libya, Julio Cesar Pineda, who reveals correspondence between the Venezuelan president and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi about the need to "solidify" ties between liberation movements in the Middle East and Latin America and use oil as an economic weapon.
Exhorting his countrymen to return to their "Arab roots," Chavez has paid state visits to Libya, Iraq and Iran and signed a series of mutual-cooperation treaties with the rogue governments whose operatives now are flooding into Venezuela. There they can blend into an ethnic Arab community estimated at half-a-million.***
On the contrary. Every country has the duty to decide what is good and bad in the world, and to act on it.
You make your choice. We make ours. Sooner or later, we all meet in the middle.
Wanna bet?
Tell that to Milosevic, I'm sure he'd be heartened by that news.
Sending suicide bombers to attack an American city using chemical and biological weapons...
Wanna make that a dare, Fidel, er, Hugo? Heck, it's close enough for me. Why wait till he's beggin' for it? Let's overthrow this Marxist-Lenninist pile of shiite.
(Why is the CIA and State keeping so quiet about his support for terrorism and narco-terrorist/leftist insurgency?)
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