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...laid out in this Rumsfeld op-ed, "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez" (12/1/07, Washington Post). He says we're losing the information war in Latin America.
The Obama government is following that plan to a T, including support for Colombia--$6 BILLION in US military aid to a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth, and now, SEVEN new US military bases in Colombia, which is located on Venezuela's border, near its main oil region--and continued USAID and other funds to rightwing groups all over Latin America, including within the targeted countries (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia) where fascist groups are plotting the secession of their resource-rich provinces from the national governments and their leftist leaders. Rumsfeld calls for "swift action" by the US in support of "friends and allies" in South America. I think he means military action in support of these fascist secessionist plots.
Whether Obama will be the one to implement this war plan or not, it is being set up. Broadcasting VOA propaganda to the Andes region is part of very big, very intense psyops/disinformation campaign--a "Big Lie" campaign that is very similar to the one on WMDs in Iraq. It is aimed first and foremost against Hugo Chavez--and has been pervasive throughout the corpo-fascist 'news' monopolies over the last four years, with the intensity of it increasing recently (and all of it completely unjustified)--and now against Evo Morales (see the lying, vicious Mary O'Grady column in the Wall Street Urinal this week). The psyops against Rafael Correa (Ecuador) have been extremely treacherous (and very Rumsfeldian), but more locally focused. They haven't really started on him yet, in our press, except to group him in with these other "commie dictators."
It is very dismaying to have voted for peace, and then to see this Rumsfeld war plan being put in place by a President who hypnotized voters with that word--peace. But I've had this experience once before, in my first vote for president, in 1964. I voted for the candidate who ran on a platform of peace, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and who vilified his opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a warmonger.
The parallels to Vietnam do not end there. The US military buidup in Colombia is very like the US military buildup in South Vietnam, throughout the 1964 campaign, while LBJ convinced us that his goal was peace. That we were being plunged into a war in which two million Southeast Asians and over 55,000 US soldiers would die was not even hinted at, until a month before the election, when the 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident was fabricated, to start the dramatic escalation of US military forces over the next year. This Colombia/Pentagon agreement for SEVEN new US military bases in Colombia has NO LIMIT on the number of US troops and 'contractors' that can be sent to Colombia, all of them with full diplomatic immunity from Colombian laws. It was negotiated in secret--from the American people, from the Colombian people, and from other Latin American leaders. The Bush-appointed US ambassador to Colombia has signed it on behalf of President Barack Obama, and it now has to be approved by Congress (where Jim DeMint (Puke-SC) seems to be running Obama's foreign policy in Latin America).
Don't be surprised if we see "Gulf of Tonkin"-II, somewhere on the Colombia/Venezuela border, when this matter comes up for a vote in Congress. Several such incidents have already occurred between our proxy army (Colombia's) and Venezuelan troops trying to protect their border. The ground is being prepared. There are already US troops and Blackwater 'contractors' in Colombia to escalate a border incident into a US/Venezuela confrontation. And the more US troops and 'contractors' are infused into the situation, the more likely will that become.
Beware of Democrats bearing peace. That's what I learned in 1964, at a young age. The evidence is growing that President Obama supports this war plan, or is at the very least content to see the war assets put into place, for a war that will be started when the time is ripe. I voted for him. I voted for peace. And I have been a loyal, active Democrat all my life, in the hope that our party leaders would one day start representing our interests and not those of the war profiteers. That hope is dying, in me, as I see what are becoming rather overwhelming signs of another oil war, this time in our own hemisphere.
But even if we were able to sweep this all away--the demonization of Chavez and other good leaders, the seven new US military bases in Colombia, with unlimited and immunized US forces, the new US military bases in Panama, the reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, the rightwing military coup in Honduras (and consequent securing of the US military base and port facilities in Honduras), President Obama stabbing the elected president of Honduras in the back and abandoning democracy in Honduras, and more--even if all this were not true, what is the US doing pouring our tax dollars into propagandizing the people of the Andes? What possible justification is there for that? What business is it of ours to do that?
Obama promised an end to such interference in Latin America. He lied.
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