A Splendid Little Provocation

George W. Bush has lost quite a bit off his fastball over the past few years, but occasionally he can still throw a heater high and inside.  In this case, perhaps he can even goad Uncle Hugo into charging the mound:

President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday warned Colombia not to allow a U.S. military base on its border with Venezuela, saying he would consider such an act an “aggression.”

Chavez said he would not permit Colombia’s U.S.-backed government to establish an American military base in La Guajira, a region spanning northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela.

The Venezuelan leader said if Colombia allows the base, his government will revive a decades-old territorial conflict and stake a claim to the entire region. …

Chavez urged his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, to “think it over well” before making such a decision because Venezuela will do “whatever it takes” to ensure that a U.S. military base is not built on the peninsula in the Caribbean Sea.

The La Guajira base would replace Eloy Alfaro Air Base, the one we have in Ecuador, the lease of which will expire a year and a half from now and which Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa - a Chavez stooge - has declined to renew (unless we allowed Correa to install a recuprical Ecuadorian base in Miami - cheeky of him, wasn't it?).  It's not exactly slated to be the staging area for an Operation Venezuelan Freedom; Eloy Alfaro has, for the past decade, been used to carry out drug-interdiction missions in northern South America.  It's never held more than five hundred U.S. service personnel at any one time.  Relocating it to Columbia makes practical and strategic sense, since Columbia is, after all, the nexus of the drug cartels in South America, and is a gesture of support for the pro-US regime of Alvaro Uribe to boot.  Given the malignant spread of the Castro/Chavez axis in that region over the past few years, we ought to be strengthening our military presence there a lot more than simply relocating a minor air base, if the truth be told.

But as Uncle Hugo's hysterical bluster illustrates, it is having a disproportionate symbolic effect.  Clearly Chavez considers Columbia to be within his designated sphere of influence, and therefore Uribe to be an enemy that needs to be removed.  Add this base relocation into the equation, right smack on Chavez's front doorstep, and it becomes, to him, a slap in the face.

Chavez also, I believe, is convinced that he can intimidate Uribe into backing out on the Bushies.  Otherwise he'd be undermining his own commie-quistador image by spouting impotently empty bluster.  Given that the Bush Administration only has eight months left in office, and that its Donk successor will be far more ideologically simpatico with Uncle Hugo, that belief is probably spot on.

Perhaps that's why Dubya wants to get the base moved and a new lease locked in now.  I just hope the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed sufficiently that Rodbama can't unilaterally cancel it as a "goodwill gesture" of "peace" to Uncle Hugo.

And if it provokes a private little war that would facilitate the squashing of a rogue enemy with Iranian, Russian, and ChiComm connections that we could well do without, so much the better.