The NCAA basketball tournament is over and the NBA playoffs haven’t yet started, so your office may need to operate a betting pool on some topic, just to keep things interesting. And here’s a suggestion: Which country will George W. Bush invade in 2006?
Some smart money will be put on Iran. After all, it was among the three nations in the “Axis of Evil” that he denounced in his 2002 State of the Union address. He’s already ordered American soldiers into Iraq, which leaves North Korea and Iran.
We have soldiers on both sides of Iran, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a port and staging area in Kuwait. And recently news leaked out that some planners in the Pentagon were looking into air strikes against Iran to keep it from developing nuclear weapons.
But early last week, Bush called that “wild speculation.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States “is on a diplomatic track” with Iran, and, “That is the president’s decision.”
Since we should be able to trust their word on such matters, which other country looks like the best bet?
Consider the benefits of invading Venezuela. Its president, Hugo Chavez, is rabidly anti-American and adores Fidel Castro. He has reduced his nation’s cooperation with America’s war on drugs. The United States has already tried to oust him by unofficially supporting a failed 2002 coup and a 2004 recall election. It seems clear that the Bush administration wants a “regime change” in Venezuela.
Now look at the other benefits of invading Venezuela:
It has oil, lots of oil. At 1.2 million barrels per day in January, Venezuela is America’s fourth-largest supplier, topped only by Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Certainly it’s a better deal than Iraq, which supplies us only 432,000 barrels a day.
A U.S. invasion would teach an important lesson to other Latin American countries. As it is, they’re getting uppity and electing anti-American leaders who don’t toe the capitalist line. A socialist, Michelle Bachelet Jeria, won the Jan. 15 presidential election in Chile. In the Peruvian election last week, Ollanta Humala led all other candidates; he is supported by Chavez, and promises to redistribute the country’s wealth. In Bolivia last year, anti-Bush candidate Evo Morales won the presidency.
Elections are also scheduled May 28 in Colombia and July 2 in Mexico, with others coming this fall in Brazil and Ecuador. So Bush needs to move quickly to prevent more anti-Americans from gaining power in the Americas.
An invasion of Venezuela would divert attention away from the Middle East. Just as we quit paying attention to Afghanistan after the invasion of Iraq, we would ignore Baghdad while following the news from Caracas.
How better to handle the illegal-immigration issue? Our war planners now know that they must consider post-war occupation. And here we have an estimated 11 million undocumented aliens. Many of them already speak the language, and they’re willing to work, so enlist them for the occupation force.
We have a successful military tradition in the region, starting with the conquest of Mexico in 1846-48. Since then, we’ve been in and out of Haiti, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama and the Dominican Republic, to name a few. In other words, this is something we’re good at.
An invasion of Venezuela would solidify the Republican base. The Bush campaign strategy in 2004 was not to move toward the political center, but instead to get the faithful to turn out. It worked.
Why tamper with a successful formula, especially when Pat Robertson has called for the assassination of Chavez, predicting that the Venezuelan president will “be aiming nuclear weapons” across the Gulf of Mexico? So a pre-emptive strike would take out a potential atomic enemy while rousing the faithful to support the GOP in November.
Striking Venezuela, or even better, both it and Peru simultaneously, will have Democrats fleeing to New Zealand and Canada. As it is, they just talk about it. Some decisive military action will get these perfidious influences out of our country.
Add up all the benefits of invading Venezuela this summer, note that any downside will come after the November election, and that’s where I’d put my money in that office pool.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
