Free Republic

Last week, while most of the world banded together to condemn Russia's thuggish invasion of little Georgia, another oil-fueled villain was busy patting the aggressor on the back. We speak of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, all but forgotten in recent weeks as other international bad guys have hogged the headlines. Chavez urged the Russians, with whom he recently concluded a multibillion-dollar arms deal, to go all the way and topple Georgia's democratically elected government. When Chavez was still in elementary school, his hero Fidel Castro, brought the world to the nuclear brink. Now, armed with our petrodollars, he's "Castro on...

VENEZUELA-Top Washington officials worry that Venezuela and Iran may be building more than economic bridges.They started with an agreement to build tractors, but Iran and Venezuela have quickly moved to oil, cement, homes, auto parts, shipbuilding and perhaps even nuclear energy. The new friendship between the two deeply anti-American governments was further cemented last month as Iranian Parliament speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel headed a delegation that visited Venezuela and drew expressions of support from populist President Hugo Chávez. ''It's a natural byproduct of their confrontation with the United States,'' said Armando Durán, a columnist and former Venezuelan foreign minister....