VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: Frankly, I never did have much in common with Michael Rowan who writes regular opinion pieces in the Caracas broadsheet El Universal, but in this I agree with his headline "In this game of chess with Russia, who is the king and who is the pawn?"
While I remember that Michael, once, apologized profusely to President Hugo Chavez Frias for some excessive Rowanesque verbosity, and vowed henceforth to set aside his pen, he's obviously saved the goose another feather and modified his input to a keyboard in continuing diatribes -- some quite justified -- against all and everything that Chavez stands for.
Michael's simile drawn with a chessboard ahead of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Venezuela is rather apt for the occasion since, as Michael states, even 30 years ago when Chavez began the trajectory that would take him to the Presidency of Venezuela, he was not destined to reach the Major Leagues, even in baseball.
Venezuela's problem today -- and yes, Venezuela does have incredible problems on a home front, especially within Chavez' own clutch of headless chickens posing as government ministers -- is that no matter the amount of warplanes he's buying from Russia and China, no matter the establishment of tractor factories and industrial projects with Iran, no matter the other alliances he has forged in obvious defiance of the Bald-headed Eagle to the North, no matter the naval and military exercises about to begin off Venezuela's Caribbean coast suspiciously in very close calendar with the November 23 local and regional elections, he's far from realizing that toying with the Russian Bear is not playing with Winnie the Pooh or Paddington, but rather a backwoods scenario in which the salmon can easily be plucked from the rapids.
It is therefore that Michael Rowan paints a picture of a relative rookie going to bat against a pro!
Yet with obvious flourish in support of United States hegemony, Michael Rowan cites Vladimir Lenin as saying that "wars are fought not to win something, but to recover something!" He adds that Russia has much to recover, including a dozen nations that emerged from the Soviet Union after its collapse and a reputation as a warrior nation that's unparalleled in history.
"The exercise of power by the savage Russians, stretches from the old czars,
Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, to their modern versions: Lenin, Stalin
and now Putin, who manages power behind the nominal presidency of Dmitry
Medvedev. The Russian winter defeated Napoleon and Hitler and became the final
resting place for millions of Russians who disappeared in the Gulag. The
Russians, in the past and present, play seriously. The Russians did NOT invent
chess, but they've been the masters of victory in that game."
Which is why I tend to agree with Michael, at least on this occasion, since it's more than obvious that Chavez is walking headlong into just another disaster among many hapless decisions he has recently made in the conduct of Venezuela's body politic.
Perhaps it is Chavez' intrinsic self-belief and his delusion that those placed in authority under him have the same sense of, shall we say, national destiny? Chavez is obviously driven by an ambition to emulate South America's Liberator of two centuries since, Simon Bolivar, who had had insuperable problems of his own with the mayhem of Caracas government and went off to die in exile in Santa Marta (Colombia).
One could scarcely accuse Chavez of being Churchillian in statesmanship and his current very public panic, threatening to put tanks on the streets and to imprison opposition leaders on spurious charges of corruption, on top of the exclusion of more than 300 candidates from running for public office in the November 23 elections, merely on equally spurious claims of corruption, belies the fact that he has done absolutely nothing to put the brakes on very visible corruption, malfeasance and downright incompetence among a myriad of fellow-travellers on his quest to paint Venezuela red ... as though a coat of paint will cover up the ever-widening cracks in his own facade.
In today's edition of El Nacional, Michael Rowan pens ... err, inputs to his keyboard ... that Putin's stooge Medvedev is no better than Bush's Cheney or Condoleezza Rice in political duplicity. He says that Russia is experiencing massive decline at home ... that Russia "is led by ruthless mafias that have fostered an atmosphere of chaos, looting, corruption and crime."
In this, undoubtedly, Chavez' Venezuela is blood-brother with Russia for it is also collapsing from within...
Rowan enthuses: "What's Putin's game, except to threaten enemies with thousands of nuclear missiles rotting in silos, ready to be sold to terrorists? And where are these terrorists ... and where can these transactions for nuclear weapons take place secretly in this complicated world?"
"When the 'Peter the Great' nuclear cruiser arrives in La Guaira, Venezuelans should ask themselves who controls the next move in this game of chess with Russia ... who is the king and who is the pawn?"
Does one really need to spell it out ... CHECKMATE!
Roy S. Carson
vheadline@gmail.com
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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.
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Good to "hear" about the naval exercises about to begin in waters close to Venezuela - and its forthcoming elections. One can not but help wondering why the beltway bullies want to help Chavez. Nothing unites a people as much as an outside threat - a theme in "1984", and if there is none, those in power have to create one. No need now.
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