The United Nations Conspiracy to Destroy America. Michael Benson
to the War on Drugs and said American agents were in the country not to stop drug trafficking but to spy.
The United States, he pointed out, was the world’s largest consumer of drugs, and yet it did little to reduce the number of drug users inside America. While DEA and FBI agents were busy in Venezuela, he noted that they ignored the drug barons who were living inside the United States.
Clearly, the president did not have the right attitude to maximize the war on drugs within his country. Criticisms of Chavez’s words were few from official U.S. sources. Remember, he had coke and oil at his back. Venezuela was a major supplier of oil to the United States.
Chavez’s job when he came to New York in 2006 was to make George W. Bush look bad in the eyes of the world. But there was a flaw in the plan. Trouble was the world was a sophisticated place and Chavez was not a sophisticated man.
Chavez Calls Bush the D-Word
Famously, Chavez called Bush “the Devil” at the UN in September 2006. The name calling said more about Chavez than Bush. Chavez’s insults to Bush were sometimes personal and below the belt. During another speech that week in New York, he called Bush “an alcoholic and a sick man.”
Any political advantage Chavez and his anti-American allies might have sought backfired as even Bush’s political enemies at home fought to be first to condemn the Venezuelan lunatic.
For example, Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, said, “Even though many American people are critical of our president, we resent the fact that he would come to the United States and criticize President Bush.”
Raucous Carnivals, Shrill Displays
Chavez wasn’t the only anti-American lunatic to speak before the 2006 General Assembly. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran also spoke, using the opportunity once again to call the Holocaust a hoax and to assail the “hegemonic powers for their exclusionist policies on international decision-making mechanisms, including the Security Council.”
David Usbourne wrote in a British periodical that lunatic dictators “hijacked [2006’s] UN General Assembly and turned it into a raucous carnival of anti-Americanism. It perhaps will not hurt Mr. Bush’s domestic standing, but for American diplomacy abroad it was, at the very least, unsettling.”
About the UN-sponsored hatemongering, Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation added, “It has been one of the shrillest displays of anti-Americanism in recent years. This is a huge public diplomacy challenge, but also a strategic threat.” Gardiner said the Chavez Devil quote was “the strongest attack from any foreign leader on U.S. soil in decades.”
Ducks in a Row
In the days before the 2006 General Assembly convened, the axis of the South could be heard getting its anti-American ducks in a row. The so-called Non-Aligned Movement met in Havana, Cuba, where Cuba’s vice president, Carlos Lage Dávila criticized “the worldwide dictatorship by the United States.”
One thing crystallized during those days: America’s enemies didn’t always have a lot in common—Venezuela and Cuba were very different places from Iran and Yemen—but their common hatred proved to be a strong bond.
World leaders previously reluctant to speak up on anti-American, anti-Western issues were emboldened by the tone of the 2006 meetings. President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, a man who might have previously held his tongue, freely spoke against UN efforts to deploy a blue-helmet peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Evo Morales of Bolivia joined the fray and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan created an anti-American stir when he announced that “the United States threatened to bomb his country into the Stone Age” if he did not join the war against terror.
Coca Kooks and Shoe Bangers
There were incidents during the UN meetings that reminded historians of the infamous scene during the height of the Cold War when Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on a table as a form of anti-American protest.
Forty-five years later, a Bolivian leader used a coca leaf as a visual aid, waving it angrily as he spoke about U.S. attempts to destroy Bolivian coca crops.
Chavez was relentlessly ambitious and had a history of using the UN to boost his own power. He used the organization as a tool by which to move his wild South American chess pieces closer to endgame and the toppling of the Stars and Stripes. In 2006 Chavez also came with props, waving an anti-American book as he spoke, recommending that everyone read it.
Attempts to undermine Bush’s support inside the United States might have fallen on deaf ears, but these dictators with their crude comments did successfully malign the Security Council as a “relic” of World War II, composed of nations that felt “entitled to world dictatorship.”
Plans in Haiti
In 2010 Chavez still had a big mouth and was quick with the verbal barb at his enemies, but had he lost his hunger for power? Was he now content to be baron number one in Venezuela?
There was a clear indication that the answer was no. In the days following the deadly earthquake that tore apart Haiti, even as death estimates ran in the hundreds of thousands, Chavez was already spinning the story to his benefit, with an eye toward increased leftist power in Haiti.
The earthquake had caused a power vacuum—one the socialists, the UN, and the U.S. military were all eager to fill. Chavez used his own Venezuelan TV show, called Hello, President to launch his leftist scheme.
Chavez told his people that Venezuela was a country with a large heart and—with Haitians in trouble—wanted to help in any way it could. But that large-hearted effort was being stifled, stymied, and thwarted by the Americans who got there first. The Yankees, as he called them, had clogged up all of Haiti’s ports so that Venezuelan ships, crammed to the brim with relief aid, were not being allowed to dock so they could not unload. It was an example of a typical American power grab, he exclaimed.
But the intrepid Venezuelan humanitarian effort did not give up easily. The ships simply moved to a Dominican Republic port where they were allowed to dock. From there the food and medicine were transported over the land to the Haitian disaster area.
He said that he had great plans for the rebuilding of Haiti. He personally planned to take a leadership role in making Haiti a thriving place. He would team up with Cuba and all the other like-minded governments in the region to build hospitals and schools in Haiti and set up agricultural programs. He was a progressive thinker. He wanted the world to know that and sought to perpetuate the humanitarian effort by installing a system through which Haitians could feed themselves forever.
The left-leaning leaders of Latin America were working with a regional trade group called the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) to fix Haiti. ALBA was looking for contributions, Chavez noted.
Before finishing his little chat with the nation, Chavez got in one last slam at the Yankees, claiming that the Pentagon was using the earthquake as an excuse to occupy Haiti. He called the disaster area a “battlefield.” Chavez promised he would not allow “the gringo empire to take over Haiti.”
Most of this was a crock, although it was confirmed that Venezuela did contribute some food and oil to Haiti. Chavez hungered for power, there could be no question about that, but the sort of power he sought needed a bite that an appearance on the Hello, President TV show couldn’t muster. He knew that, even with the UN on his side, he’d been rendered weak in Haiti, and he wanted to make sure his people knew that he was still a strong man and that they should never forget who the good guys and the bad guys were.
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