Jonathan

Venezuelan Reckoning Approaches

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Val e-diction eloquently summarizes and frames in geopolitical context recent events in Venezuela.

A second Cuba is impossible in modern times, we have been told. The Chile of Salvador Allende was a weird consequence of the Cold War and, in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas made a mistake holding elections before they controlled everything. Hugo Chávez wanted to prove everybody wrong, he planned to go forward at his own pace.

[. . .]

With a Constitution made to measure and sure of governing under a democratic mantle for years to come, he began penetrating and dominating the country’s public institutions. All of them fell to his soft mallet, one by one, slowly, democratically. . .

[. . .]

But then something happened that changed Chávez’s plan. An unprecedented two-month general strike and huge daily marches and demonstrations, led by the same spoiled middle class he knew was incapable of resistance . . . The writing was on the wall, Chávez would have to repeat the Sandinista mistake. He is in a hurry now, the plan accelerated, the phasing shortened, the mallet now a bludgeon, paradise must be conquered by force. Let’s discard the cloak, for it impedes the advance.

Val has it right (“As in Mein Kampf, the truth had long been there for everybody to see”). Chávez is the problem and Venezuela will not be stable or free as long as he remains in power.

There are parallels between Venezuela and Chile. Conventional wisdom holds that Allende was a social democrat in a hurry, that his overthrow by the Chilean army was a criminal act if not indeed engineered by the evil CIA. Allende was elected, after all.

The problem with this view is that it ignores Allende’s behavior: his avowed socialism; his close collaboration with Fidel Castro; and his relentless power grabbing via creation of a private army, property expropriations, and other measures that weakened the rule of law and made Chileans more dependent on the State. As Robert Moss pointed out, Chile at the time of the coup was well on its way to becoming a communist dictatorship. Not only General Pinochet, but also a large plurality if not majority of the Chilean populace supported the coup, because it appeared to be the only way to stop Allende. So yes, Allende was elected, but the fact that a leader is elected does not confer indefinite legitimacy on his actions. Sometimes elected leaders become dictators, and sometimes it’s necessary to overthrow them. It might not have been possible to vote Allende out of office once he consolidated power. The Chilean army’s coup was ugly but the alternative was probably worse. (And the Army, to its great credit, eventually relinquished power.)

While the current Venezuelan situation appears to parallel Chile’s under Allende, Venezuela may actually be worse off in some respects. Chile in 1973 was not so many years removed from having been a reasonably well functioning democracy, whereas Venezuela in 2003 is on the south end of three decades of oil-fueled political decay and seems not to have institutions that can fulfill the same role as Chile’s army. The anti-Chávez opposition enjoys substantial popular support but so far has lacked a core group with the power and determination to overthrow the government. (Either that or Chávez has learned well the lessons of the failed leftist dictatorships and won’t give his opponents any breaks. Thus he made sure to disarm the Caracas police — an opposition stronghold — before they could cause problems.)

The situation is unstable. Chávez won’t compromise and the productive parts of the country can’t spend all of their time fighting him without seriously harming themselves, which is what happened during the recent strike. The anti-Chávez forces tend to rely on democratic tactics like mass demonstrations, and especially referenda, which require much advance planning and are relatively inflexible with respect to schedule. The opposition is also relatively law-abiding. Chávez is completely unscrupulous and can be more flexible tactically. He can wait for the opposition to make plans and then respond on his own terms.

Given that Chávez must consolidate power or eventually be tossed out, the main constraint he faces may be the possibility that the U.S. will intervene if he goes too far. On the other hand, he knows that he’ll lose if he does nothing. So when will he act? He has been increasingly willing to use violence against his opponents. If he continues to get away with it, there will be no reason for him not to escalate. It’s therefore a good thing that the international press, as Val points out, is beginning to pay serious attention to Chávez’s dangerous behavior. What happens next may be a function of how much the press is distracted by the beginning of the war in Iraq. Val reminds us that Chávez reads the same papers that the North Koreans do.

There’s no telling what will happen, but I think Chávez is capable of anything if he believes that he can get away with it. I wish Venezuelans luck. I hope that the international press, and bloggers too, keep enough focus on that country to prevent the worst from coming to pass.

Postscript

Caracas Chronicles has an excellent three-part series on the decline of Venezuela’s political culture:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

There’s also this article and this one on the newly skeptical tone in international press coverage of Chávez. Note that the first post predicts that Chávez will move against private television stations as soon as the U.S. attacks Iraq.

War Crimes Trials?

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Here’s a reason to be skeptical that they will happen. Justice and deterrence may be served better by having our military kill Iraqi leaders (or allow them to be killed) rather than subject them to a legal process that is potentially hostage to State Department whims.

(Via Jim Miller)

Garçon!

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As a student, Jacques Chirac spent time in the U.S. where he worked in a restaurant. Here’s a previously unpublished photo.

Jacques

Worrisome Trend or Meaningless Blip?

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The real-money odds of Saddam Hussein’s defeat, as determined in an online market established by an Irish betting shop, have drifted lower recently. The odds of his defeat by March 31 were last priced at only 27 percent, down 6 percent today; odds he will be out by June 30 were last at 73 percent, down about five points in the past few days.

Look at this as an options market. If the market’s expectations for the date of a U.S. attack on Iraq were converging on April or May, one would expect March odds of overthrowing Hussein to decrease but June odds to increase. By the same reasoning, market expectations of an attack in March or earlier would raise the odds for all expiration dates. And if there were increased uncertainty about the timing of our attack but no change in the expectation that we would overthrow Hussein (i.e., a situation analogous to higher implied volatility), one would expect the March odds to increase, and the June odds to increase or remain unchanged. Yet in the actual market both March and June odds are lower in the short term, which suggests either that there is less likelihood that we will attack than is popularly believed or that there is less likelihood that we will depose Hussein if we do attack. Neither possibility is attractive to those of us who want to purge Hussein ASAP.

The odds outlook can always change, however. In particular, a resumption of the long-term upward trend (click on “IRAQ.SADDAM.JUNE03” in this window to see a chart) in the June odds would suggest that the odds were converging on a post-March attack date, which would be encouraging. It would probably not be as good as attacking earlier, but it’s not so bad given diplomatic delays (Turkey) and what we can speculate about the pace of U.S. preparations.

Still, the real concern is whether U.S. involvement with the UN will substantially delay or ultimately prevent our attack. I doubt it, but it’s possible, and that’s why these short-term retracements in the odds make me nervous. I think the case for invasion is crystal clear, but it’s easy to forget that lots of people see things differently. I hope that the people who don’t want us to attack Iraq will change their minds, and that my blog-centric view hasn’t distorted my judgment about what’s likely to happen.

UPDATE: On the other hand, this article suggests that Iraqis are optimistic, which is a very good sign indeed. (Via Iain Murray)

Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

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Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft coauthored an op-ed (requires subscription) in last Thursday’s WSJ in which they called for another moral-equivalence imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The principal features of the proposal should be familiar to us by now:

• Two independent states with boundaries approximating the pre-June 1967 borders with territorial adjustments that are the result of negotiation and not unilateral annexation. In effect, the Palestinian “right of return” to Israel would be exchanged for Israel’s relinquishing of the settlements, except on those territories exchanged by mutual agreement. • Arrangements for Jerusalem that accommodate two separate sovereignties while — insofar as possible — keeping the city physically undivided. • Relief and justice for Palestinian refugees in ways that do not threaten Israel’s demographic balance (e.g., a “right of return” applied to the new Palestinian state and generous international funding for repatriation, resettlement and compensation[)]. • A protection regime for sites deemed holy by Jews, Christians and Moslems. • Agreement on arrangements for internal and external security.

In other words, the Palestinians, having been offered recently a very similar deal by the Israelis, and having rejected that deal and started a war, which they lost, are now to be offered the same deal again. They are to pay no penalty for their bad judgment and bad faith.

Much of the rest of the column is delusional boilerplate that denies the obvious:

All previous efforts to end the violence and turn to a political process have failed because each side has maintained that the first step must be taken by the other. If the road map is not to encounter the same fate, the U.S. and its partners must insist on a 100% Palestinian Authority effort to end violence that is unconditional and independent of actions demanded of Israel. They must similarly insist on an unconditional cessation of Israeli settlement expansion (including so-called natural growth) that is independent of actions required of Palestinians. This parallelism is not to suggest moral equivalence. It is to recognize that no peace talks are possible if Palestinians fail to exert 100% effort to halt terrorism or if Israel continues to encroach on Palestinian lives and property.

To state that “this parallelism is not to suggest moral equivalence” is rich, since the obvious point of this statement was indeed to suggest a moral equivalence between those whose commit or sponsor murderous terror attacks and those who build settlements. Indeed, far from being a function of process or misunderstanding (“each side has maintained that the first step must be taken by the other”), the violence has been driven by the Palestinian leadership which has embraced terror as a political tool when it couldn’t get what it wanted by negotiation. Why should the Palestinians now be awarded a clean slate? And why should Israelis assent to a plan which from the beginning is so tilted against them? (They wouldn’t, which is why this deal would have to be imposed by the U.S. via threats and costly bribes.)

David Frum addressed these issues in his blog and wondered about the authors’ motives:

So: Brzezinski and Scowcroft are advocating that the U.S. embark on another probably doomed attempt to midwife a Palestinian state in order to win European, Arab, and Muslim support for an Iraq policy that Brzezinski and Scowcroft oppose. That’s illogical enough. But what elevates the illogic to almost postmodern levels is that the U.S. is in fact already winning the Arab and European support that Brzezinski and Scowcroft say it cannot win. Meanwhile, the countries that continue to oppose U.S. policy in Iraq – like France and Russia – do not even bother to cite the Palestinian issue as an excuse. I’m beginning to wonder whether for a certain type of foreign-policy expert, the “Middle East peace process” isn’t becoming a Pavlovian response: Ring the bell and they start demanding an Arafatistan. They themselves no longer remember why they do it. And they certainly cannot explain why anybody else should follow them.
Frum is right as far as he goes, but I don’t think that what drives Brzezinski and Scowcroft is so mysterious as he suggests (or maybe he is just being coy). What gives Brzezinski and Scowcroft away is their insistence on putting the Israeli-Palestinian fix in before we invade Iraq:
There is no national security reason for the U.S. to delay such a proposal. Indeed, there are important security reasons to spell out, without further delay, the broad shape of the peace agreement for which the U.S. intends to work. Arab countries and much of the Muslim world, as well as most European countries, see a direct link between their ability to be more forthcoming in supporting U.S. goals in Iraq and our commitment to working for a fair settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

This is odd, because Iraq supports the Arafat gang’s strategy of pressuring Israel via terror attacks, and because of course our adversaries want to reach agreements now, when they have more leverage than they will after any post-war realignment. Why should we accommodate them rather than wait until we have greater advantage? Any threat to the Iraqi regime undermines its support for Palestinian violence and encourages accommodation with Israel, which would be good for the U.S.

So why the rush to lock in an agreement? I think this is an example of what Lex had in mind in a recent magnum opus, when he wrote of the seemingly perverse reasoning by which our State Department comes to prefer apparently-stable tyrannies to “risky” democracy in the Middle East:

Why are we doing this? Why does the State Department want to preserve “stability” at the expense of any hope for freedom or progress for this “remote nation of twenty million people” we are about to liberate at the price of American and British blood? First, I suppose, bureaucratic inertia. The State Department is terrified of any change in the region because its institutional interest lies in preserving the personnel and regimes it has invested in and cultivated. The State Department’s franchise is access, knowing whom to call. If a brand new regime comes along, all that goes in the waste basket. The last thing these guys want is the House of Saud swept into the trash can [. . .]
Brzezinski and Scowcroft are sophisticated and public-spirited men. However, they are realists in the sense that Lex uses the term: they are capable of imagining how much worse things could always become, and so tend to favor incremental solutions that seem unlikely to lead to disaster if things go awry. But as Lex points out, the “realist” model can fail at historical inflection points where radical change may be less risky than tinkering on the margins. It looks like we are at such a point now.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft also probably have a great deal of time and effort invested in relationships, “access,” and intellectual models for understanding the Middle East as it is today. Like State Department bureaucrats, and consultants generally, they stand to lose if the old order is replaced by something radically different. It is not inconceivable that their op-ed is a trial balloon in the foreign-affairs bureaucracy’s effort to make its case against proponents of radical change. Did Colin Powell have a hand in its writing? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter. It’s more important that advocates of democracy and regime change realize that they are not going to be given a free ride on this topic and must continue to make their case forcefully and repeatedly.

Are you listening, W?