The Logic of Chávez's Affair With Qaddafi

Mr. Chávez isn't crazy. He isn't a complete lunatic. If he indeed sees the US as his enemy -- as the enemy of Simón Bolívar's dream of a free and independent South America (and by extension, Central America and the Caribbean), then it makes sense that he would befriend those who most irritate the US and are doing their utmost to subvert its interests around the world.

By Marco Cáceres
There is an old Arab proverb that goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” There is a similar Chinese proverb as well. The saying is helpful in trying to understand why Venezuela's Hugo Chávez has gone out of his way to defend Muammar Qaddafi, even as recently as in the last couple of days when it has finally become crystal clear to everyone that the era of Mr. Qaddafi, and that of other fairly unappealing dictators in the Middle East such as Syria's Bashar Assad, has finally come to an end. As tempting as it may be to assume that the reason Mr. Chávez appears to display so much support for Mr. Qaddafi is that he approves of his style of rule (which he indeed may), it is not as simple as that. Neither was it as simple as that when Mr. Chávez appeared to show so much affection for Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. What drives Mr. Chávez's foreign policy has less to do with those he seems to back, and more with what he clearly despises -- the American Empire. "Without a doubt, we're facing imperial madness," Mr. Chávez said yesterday, condemning NATO airstrikes in Libya.

Thus, whenever Mr. Chávez sees an opportunity to stick it to the United States and annoy it by cozying up to individuals like Mr. Qaddafi or Mr. Zelaya or Mr. Ortega in Nicaragua or Mr. Ahmadinejad in Iran or Fidel in Cuba, he does so without any hesitation. Given his unrestrained ego, infantile nature, and proclivity for authoritarianism, Mr. Chávez may well identify with these kind of people, and thus sincerely like them and wish to be friends with them. But that is beside the point.

Mr. Chávez's primary aim is to shake up the status quo in the world, and particularly in the Western Hemisphere, in order to vastly diminish US power and influence. And it is not so much that he envisions Venezuela filling the void, but rather that he feels that anyone is better than them arrogant, meddling, and overbearing Yanquis.

Unfortunately, the truth is that for all his negative traits, Mr. Chávez isn't crazy. He isn't a complete lunatic. If he indeed sees the US as his enemy -- as the enemy of Simón Bolívar's dream of a free and independent South America (and by extension, Central America and the Caribbean), then it makes sense that he would befriend those who most irritate the US and are doing their utmost to subvert its interests around the world.

At first appearance, the idea of choosing your friends based on who your enemies most dislike may seem distasteful, even abhorrent. But the strategy is employed all the time by governments. You only have to look at the history of US foreign relations.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the US was mighty friendly with Saddam Hussein because he served as a counterweight to the Ayatollahs in Iran. Of course, there were all those petty little dictatorships in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1950s through the 1970s that the US gladly helped prop up as a counterweight to the perceived or real communist threat. There was Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

In the 1980s, there were the Contras -- the so-called "freedom fighters" -- in Nicaragua which had to be financed, trained, and armed to keep Central America safe from the spread of Sandinismo. There have been so many more. The Reagan administration feared the Sandinistas so much that it was even willing to secretly sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Contras. It was a kind of backdoor deal to get around an inconvenient law called the "Boland Amendment" which prohibited direct US assistance to the Contras.

Geopolitics is a nasty game. Epecially if you're playing to win. (8/24/11) (photo courtesy Internet)

Note: The author is the editor and cofounder of Honduras Weekly. He is also the cofounder of projecthonduras.com, an international network of volunteers involved in humanitarian development projects aimed at empowering the people of Honduras. He directs the annual Conference on Honduras in the town of Copán Ruinas in northwestern Honduras. He was born in Tegucigalpa.

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