EVEN DURING the sordid 1980s, when Ronald Reagan backed right-wing paramilitary forces in El Salvador (to defend a weak, pro-American government) and Nicaragua (to overthrow a weak, anti-American government), the United States did not manage to unseat a democratically elected ruler in Latin America. For that, you’d have to go all the way back to 1973, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger conspired to topple Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende. Allende was assassinated, and his successor, the brutal but pro-American Augusto Pinochet, set off a wave of right-wing terror that did not abate for two decades.
Enter George W. Bush. Last month, following days of civil unrest, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was overthrown by that country’s military and replaced by an unelected businessman. The coup leaders reported that Chávez had resigned — a claim promptly exposed as a lie several days later, when the left-leaning populist Chávez rode popular support back into office.
The trouble for the Bush administration was that it had made no secret of its support for the coup. Administration officials reportedly even met with coup plotters and gave them encouragement. The Economist, in an otherwise negative assessment of Chávez, wrote: "If this is true, it would suggest extraordinary shortsightedness by Latin America’s mighty neighbour. A message that George Bush welcomed the overthrow of inconvenient elected politicians would be noted in barracks everywhere." In a similar vein, the ultraconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page denounced Chávez as "an anti-American thug," but added: "But he is a twice-elected thug, and some expression on behalf of democratic values from the White House would have helped U.S. credibility in the long run."
Then, too, Venezuela is the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter — and, potentially, much easier to manipulate than that nasty Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who showed up in Crawford, Texas, last week insulting the president and demanding that no women guard his precious air space. So it’s hardly surprising to learn that Chávez’s real sin against the US may have been to ram through a recent law that raised from 16 percent to 30 percent the royalties that foreign companies must pay to pump its oil. "This explains Chávez’s unpopularity — at least within that key constituency, the American petroleum industry," wrote Greg Palast, a columnist for the British newspaper the Guardian. (NarcoNews.com has put up some great links on the almost-coup and its aftermath, as well as commentary by publisher and former Phoenix staffer Al Giordano.)
A lust for oil is also behind the Bushies’ continued obsession with drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. The plan was killed last month in the Senate, with two of Bush’s potential presidential rivals, Massachusetts senator John Kerry and Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, leading the way. Not that there isn’t some cynicism on both sides here — by all accounts, there is so little oil in ANWR that this has become a fight about symbolism more than substance, with the environmental lobby and oil interests turning this into a loyalty test for their respective supporters. Environmentalist rhetoric about the pristine wilderness would ring pretty damn hollow if ANWR were a genuine alternative to Saudi Arabia. But it’s not, and the Bush administration’s insistence that ANWR will become a campaign issue is likely to backfire.
Nowhere, though, is American policy more likely to go bad (or, rather, get worse) than in Colombia, into which the US has been pumping vast sums of military aid in the hopes of stemming that country’s 40-year-old civil war and crippling its cocaine trade. "Plan Colombia" got going under Clinton, but the proper analogy is to Vietnam: Clinton, like John Kennedy, made a terrible decision to help a corrupt and inept government. Now Bush, like Lyndon Johnson, is pushing his predecessor’s decision past the point of no return.
As veteran Latin America reporter Marc Cooper recently wrote in LA Weekly, Plan Colombia puts us on the side of a government implicated in numerous human-rights abuses — not to mention right-wing paramilitary forces that wreak mayhem and murder among the civilian population — in what has been an endless war against left-wing rebels. "Plunging ahead into Colombia really is akin to racing into the proverbial dark tunnel," Cooper wrote, adding: "All sides in the conflict — the Colombian state, the leftist insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries — have become enmeshed in the drug traffic." Worse, Newsweek International recently reported (see also the Phoenix's coverage, "Colombia's Narco-candidate," This Just In, March 29) that Álvaro Uribe Vélez, a right-wing extremist likely to win Colombia’s presidential election next month, has been directly tied to the country’s notorious drug cartels.
Oh, did I mention that Colombia has oil, too?
MAYBE IT ALL began to go bad during Bush’s State of the Union address, in January, when he declared war — metaphorically, if not in reality — against an "axis of evil" comprising Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. "Axis of incoherence," sniffed Slate.
As Slate’s dismissal suggests, it wasn’t so much that Bush’s harsh rhetoric offended the Europeans. After all, everything offends the Europeans. It was that it made no sense. It lumped Iraq, a country that may be developing nukes and that may, indeed, need to be taken out, with two other very bad countries that pose little threat to us and that may, slowly, be turning more moderate and less warlike. Bush made no distinctions and offered no guidance as to what, if anything, we are likely to do about Iran and North Korea. It was weird and puzzling.
Presidents go through good and bad patches, of course, and Bush could well regain his footing before the fall elections. As syndicated columnist George Will recently observed, Bush is lucky in his opponents: the recent re-emergence of Al Gore did nothing to excite the anti-Bush forces. Poor Al may have beaten Bush once, but he’s not likely to beat him again. And so far, at least, no one else is making Bush break a sweat, either. As New York Times columnist Bill Keller put it a couple of weeks ago, "if the Democrats insist on speaking up, isn’t it fair to ask that they have something interesting to say?" It’s gotten so bad that top Democrats such as Senate majority leader Tom Daschle have taken to whining that Bush is getting more TV time than he deserves. And recent pieces in the New Republic on the Democrats’ ongoing quest for relevance inspire more pity than enthusiasm.
But there’s always the possibility that Bush’s recent woes are not a blip, but rather a resumption of the pre–September 11 political order. To return for a moment to those favorable/unfavorable ratings: last August, the New York Times/CBS News poll had Bush at 50/38, down from the 60/22 he had enjoyed just five months earlier. In August 1993 CNN/Time had Clinton at roughly the same level, 54/41.
What this shows is that, in ordinary times, George W. Bush is a very mortal president. He deserves the praise he’s gotten for the cool, measured, but decisive manner in which he responded to the terrorist attacks. But if he wants our continued support, he’s going to have to earn it.
Based on the record of recent months, that’s going to prove a much tougher challenge than keeping Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net
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