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6/21/2004 Venezuelan troops are already on standby readiness for attacks * In the countryside, the Colombian army often fights as follows: paramilitaries infiltrate a community and attempt to draw a response from the guerrillas. In the rare cases where guerrillas respond, the paramilitaries back off and the army replaces them, attacking the guerrillas with heavy weapons. This is also the ideal formula to create a border war: A paramilitary infiltration, which the Venezuelan Army would try to repel, whose defenses the Colombian Army's new heavy tanks, conveniently posted on 'border patrol', would be able to smash through once the initial 'incident' was set. This would then be presented as 'Venezuelan aggression', and no doubt the US papers would set to work writing about how Chavez started a war to prevent the referendum. The war could then quickly change from one between Colombia and Venezuela to one between the US and Venezuela. Perhaps a repeat of the 3,000 or so civilians killed in Panama's poorest neighborhoods in 1989, along with a media campaign about 'saving' them, while showing happy rich Venezuelans applauding on television, could follow? (This is an imperfect analogy: Noriega actually was a dictator. Chavez is not.) Should that happen, one of the recipients of applause will be Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe Velez. http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=21678
posted by Nathan Hall at 6/21/2004 05:32:00 PM link |
