Tag Archives: Brazil

State of the world in 2004: The backdrop of the early stages of World War IV

As we welcome in 2004, it’s time to take stock of the geopolitical panorama that provides the backdrop for the early stages of what is becoming known as World War IV:

– Mop-up operations after the hugely successful Battle of Afghanistan and Battle of Iraq, and formidable reconstruction of those blighted countries;

– Al Qaeda’s efforts to reconstitute itself, to continue funding its networks, to franchise its operations to other organizations, and to plan even more spectacular and deadlier attacks;

– Fissures in the Saudi-led Wahhabi global terrorist support network, from the epicenter in Riyadh to the cell-level arrests and neutralization of key operatives in the US and abroad;

– A strengthening, pro-US, democratic revolutionary movement in Iran – despite Washington’s unwillingness to embrace it;

– Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi apparently folding his WMD arsenal in the face of American-led firepower and iron will in Iraq, opening his programs up to international inspectors including the CIA, and publicly exhorting other regimes to follow his example (while paradoxically not following a similar course concerning his longtime support for international terrorists);

– The shrill third leg of the Axis of Evil, the North Korean regime, turning up the volume of its nuclear threat;

– The People’s Republic of China, led by a corrupt and decrepit Communist Party, milking the West on the North Korea issue, while geometrically increasing its military spending, advancing its nuclear weapon and space-launch programs, encroaching on the sovereignty of nearly all its neighbors, threatening to destroy democratic Taiwan, running extremely aggressive espionage operations against the US and its allies, and pretending to be an ally in the war against the terrorists;

– A Franco-German axis that is dividing a newly united Europe against itself and its American ally;

– An onrush of harsh anti-US populism throughout Latin America, manifested in the Chavez regime of Venezuela, and the political movements behind the new governments of Argentina and Brazil;

– Sustained, sophisticated political warfare operations waged against US interests by the anachronistic but still influential Communist regime in Cuba;

– The continued strength of narcoterrorists, especially in Colombia – as well as the new strength of those resisting and, yes, destroying narcoterrorists;

– A Mexican government whose national strategy is to export millions of illegal aliens into the United States to relieve domestic political and economic pressures, and to siphon billions of dollars in US wage remittances and Social Security payments into the Mexican economy;

– A US government that intentionally, for political reasons, refuses to enforce its own immigration laws designed to secure the borders and control who enters the country;

– Increased understanding of how jihadist political influence operations work inside the US, and gradual degradation and isolation of those operations through arrests, raids, and public exposure;

– A US government that still cannot figure out how to use political persuasion abroad to win the war;

– A president and his defense team who, despite the formidable foreign and domestic obstacles, are committed to following through and destroying the enemy, regardless of how long it may take.

Wall Street Journal tells the truth about Chile

Thirty years ago this month, the Chilean military smashed Fidel Castro’s experiment to impose totalitarianism abroad through abuses of the democratic system.

Revolutionaries and their supporters twisted the history of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup against the Allende regime, to the point that the circumstances are poorly understood. Professor James R. Whelan, the nation’s most prolific historian of Chile, sets the record straight in the Wall Street Journal.

Whalen’s article is a lesson on what happens when the bad guys dominate public perceptions and the writing of history.

Allende, Whelan recalls, was devoted to the violent overthrow of democratic governments in the hemisphere since the 1960s. “From the beginning, Allende’s Chile became a magnet for revolutionaries from all corners of the globe; eventually their numbers grew to between 10,000 and 15,000” – a veritable Marxist version of the Taliban. Allende’s Socialist Party congresses repeatedly proclaimed that “revolutionary violence is inevitable and legitimate,” calling for the destruction of existing society.

Allende stomped the Chilean constitution, illegally seizing farms and factories, defying judicial orders, and creating a climate of “unchecked street violence” and death threats against Supreme Court justices and others who tried to stand in his way. The Supreme Court warned unanimously that Allende’s Chile faced an “imminent breakdown of legality.” Three months later, the Chilean legislature passed a resolution warning that Allende was “bent on the conquest of total power . . . so as to implant a totalitarian system.”

On September 11, 1973, Allende’s handpicked chief of the army, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, led the rest of the armed forces in a reluctant move to save the country from communism or total collapse. Democratic leaders, including three former presidents, thanked the armed forcesd for liberating the country.

The Chilean military delivered the country from a certain civil war, which Communist Party ideology chief Volodia Teitelboim sayd “probably would signify immense loss of life, between half a million and a million. The death toll of the Pinochet coup, according to Whelan, was “under 200.”

“Out of the wreckage,” Whelan writes, “Gen. Pinochet and his associates erected a sturdy, realistic political system, anchored in the most carefully-crafted constitution in the country’s history, one still in effect today after 13 years of democratic rule by center-left governments.”

And the secret police that the Left whines about? The Chilean military needed help to suppress the new underground terrorist movement, a movement not unlike that directed at US forces in Iraq today. Did they turn to the CIA for secret police training?

Not at all, according to Whelan. History can credit France. “French secret service agents who had waged France’s savage war in the 1950s against Algerian independence forces coached secret police organizations in Chile — and also Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The man who headed Chile’s secret police, Manuel Contreras, said recently that Gen. Paul Aussaresses, former head of the French intelligence service, personally trained Chilean agents in Brazil.”

Bush-Lula summit: A chance to solve hemispheric security concerns

The US-Brazil summit last week was an important opportunity for Washington to strengthen ties with its giant southern neighbor – but it looked like the administration went out of its way not to hold Brazilian President Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva accountable for his sponsorship of political extremism in the hemisphere.

Bush and Da Silva issued a joint declaration that included the following language: ‘We will cooperate on issues of mutual interest that contribute to the defense and security of the hemisphere, bolstering joint efforts to counter terrorism, narcotics trafficking and consumption, trafficking in persons, and other transnational criminal challenges to regional peace.’

That’s an important commitment, especially in light of Da Silva’s sponsorship of the ‘Foro de Sao Paulo’ movement. Founded more than a decade ago under Da Silva’s Marxist Workers’ Party, the Foro de Sao Paulo is a collection of Latin American extremist political groups, including old Marxist-Leninist guerrilla and terrorist movements.

At its December, 2002 conference, the movement took predictably strident anti-US positions on world issues, and urged that no military action be taken to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Official delegates from Cuba and North Korea, which the Bush Administration lists as state-sponsors of terrorism, were invited guests.

During his presidential campaign last year, Da Silva alarmed foreign observers by indicating that he would revitalize Brazil’s mothballed and illegal nuclear weapons program, and would spur economic recovery by manufacturing and proliferating high-tech weapons.

The Bush Administration has virtually neglected Latin America, and appears unwilling to confront alarming anti-US trends in the hemisphere, pushing a ‘free-trade-uber-alles’ policy instead of playing hardball on terrorism. It’s time to reverse that neglect and to help Brazil’s economic recovery, which the US should link to the Brazilian president and his terrorism support network.

US does little as hemispheric crisis grows

A growing crisis continues to engulf much of the American hemisphere, with the rise of bitterly anti-US regimes whose leaders have longstanding ties and sympathies with state sponsors of terrorism.

The Bush administration has done nothing visible to help democratic forces in Venezuela to remove autocratic Colonel Hugo Chavez, who looks to Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and the late Mao Tse-tung as his inspirations while he aids the narcoterrorists of neighboring Colombia.

A left-wing extremist has just been inaugurated president of Brazil. President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva has spent years organizing the hemisphere’s revolutionary movements, guerrilla and terrorist groups, and their political sympathizers in collaboration with the Cuban government. He has vowed to turn Brazil into a military power, stating that the government should resume development and production of a 30-kiloton nuclear bomb and proliferate military high technology to any regime it wishes. An aide recently reiterated Lula’s nuclear plans.

A leftist colonel who tried to overthrow a democratically elected president has just been elected president of Ecuador.

Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups are strengthening their footholds throughout Latin America.

Sentiment is building to dismantle the successful, US-led inter-American security system of the past 55 years.

Meanwhile, the staunchly pro-US president of Colombia, inaugurated just months ago, wants to work more closely with the United States to crush Marxist-Leninist narcoterrorist groups in his country. The State Department responded by terminating aid to Colombia’s most effective air force unit.

It’s time for the administration to engage.

Note to President Fox: Let him quit

Mexico’s Marxist Foreign Minister, Jorge Castaeda, says he’s not getting his way, so he wants to quit. President Vicente Fox hints he might not let him leave, and says he will announce a decision on Monday.

For the sake of US-Mexican relations, Fox should let Castaeda leave. Immediately.

Most press reports have inaccurately characterized Castaeda as having worked for closer Mexican-American relations. That simply isn’t so. Castaeda’s demands have generally been one-sided, ranging from immigration to the channeling of billions of US Social Security tax dollars into Mexico.

On hemispheric security issues, Castaeda has been a threat. In his own words, he has dedicated his professional life to “trying to help the Latin American left settle scores and accounts with the past.”

Just days before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Castaeda was working aggressively behind the scenes to scrap the half-century-old Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, better known as the Rio Treaty, which unites the entire hemisphere except Castro’s Cuba in an alliance against outside aggressors.

Castaeda’s efforts backfired when Brazil invoked the treaty in a unanimous hemispheric solidarity with the United States.

Yet Mexico was one of the last countries in the world officially to offer condolences or solidarity with America after the terrorist attacks.

After waiting a decent interval, Castaeda went at it again, threatening to wreck the Rio Treaty by withdrawing Mexico and, he hopes, inducing the new or incoming leftist regimes in Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador to follow.

For the sake of inter-American security and solidarity, to say nothing of Mexican-American relations, President Fox should let his anachronistic foreign minister take his ball and go home.

Against Us

(Washington, D.C.): For months now, President Bush has been declaring that nations around the world had a choice to make. Either they would be with us or with the terrorists. Some believed, or at least hoped, that this was empty rhetoric. If that perception is not to be proven correct — with potentially debilitating repercussions for Mr. Bush’s credibility and American security interests in the years ahead — those who are now showing themselves to be against, rather than with, us must be held to account.

A Who’s Who

Topping the list, of course, are the three veto-wielding nations that have long supported Saddam Hussein in the UN Security Council, and who are doing so now. France, Russia and China appear determined to block the adoption of a new resolution that would enable the United States to move without delay to compel Iraq’s disarmament when (not if) Saddam once again thwarts UN inspectors. Unless actually forced to choose, each would prefer to maintain cordial diplomatic and lucrative trade relations with the United States, while preserving a valued client in Baghdad.

It could be that these fair-weather (if not actually false) friends have been encouraged in their intransigence by State Department interlocutors — many of whom appear to share Franco- Russian-Chinese hostility to the Bush goal of regime change in Iraq — to believe that the President will accede to efforts to dumb-down the U.S.-drafted resolution. They clearly fancy a diplomatic endgame that will have the UN’s chief sleuth, Hans Blix, going through the motions of inspection over at least the next six-months.

Officials in Paris, Moscow and Beijing well know that if such delay would not completely foreclose American military action, it would certainly defer it until late next year. They may even succeed at last in their efforts to terminate sanctions on Iraq once it is certified (however unjustifiably) to be free of weapons of mass destruction. It is a safe bet that, as soon as sanctions are gone, they will be among the foreign suppliers willing to provide Saddam whatever additional lethal technology and weaponry he desires.

There is a similar risk that Russia and China — and even more reliable “friends,” like South Korea and Japan — may perceive Mr. Bush’s temperate stance towards North Korea’s nuclear weapons program as an invitation to try to have it both ways: Suffering no costs in their relationship with us even as they continue to prop up and reward the malfeasance of one of the planet’s most dangerous regimes.

Then there is the emerging danger emanating from our own hemisphere. The election this weekend of a radical socialist as president of Brazil may further catalyze trends with the potential to transform a region we have generally taken for granted as comprised almost entirely of democratic friends of the United States into one hostile towards us and hospitable to our international terrorist foes.

A warning about this dangerous prospect was communicated last week to President Bush by one of the most distinguished and respected members of the U.S. House of Representatives and chairman of its International Relations Committee, Rep. Henry Hyde. In particular, Mr. Hyde called attention to what he called a possible “axis of evil in the Americas” forged by Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Brazil’s Lula da Silva.

Of particular concern is the possibility that the enthusiasm “Lula” has declared for resuscitating Brazil’s long-dormant nuclear program could put atomic weapons and ballistic missiles into the hands of this axis and its unsavory friends (for example, Chavez has established close ties with virtually every terrorist-sponsoring regime and several terrorist organizations, notably Colombia’s FARC and the IRA). Rep. Hyde correctly points out that the United States can begin to counter this metastasizing danger by working with those who are against Chavez, and with us, in the Venezuelan opposition.

Among the other nations who are making known where they stand are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The true colors of the former are on display as Egyptian state-controlled television broadcasts nightly during Ramadan 41-segments of a series loosely based on the Russian blood- libel known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Such incitement to hatred of and violence against our ally, Israel, is incompatible with being a true friend of the United States — to say nothing of enjoying the status of peacemaker and “moderate Arab state” that garners for Egypt billions each year in U.S. tax dollars and advanced weapons.

Saudi Arabia’s alignment with America’s enemies extends far beyond the anti-U.S. and anti- Western propaganda that is also ceaselessly disseminated by the kingdom’s government-run media. In fact, for some fifty years, Saudi official, royal family and what passes for private sector institutions have been expending untold sums to promote the state religion — a virulently intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism. Washington has long ignored the individual and cumulative effects of such spending on Wahhabi proselytizing, recruiting, indoctrination, training and equipping of adherents who embrace the sect’s injunction to convert or kill infidels.

In the wake of terrorism made possible — or at least abetted — at home and abroad by such Saudi-connected activities, the United States can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to this profoundly unfriendly behavior. That is particularly true insofar as there is reason to believe that Wahhabi enterprises are giving rise to perhaps the most insidious enemy of all: an Islamist Fifth Column operating within this country.

The Bottom Line

Fortunately, the United States does have friends, nations that are genuinely “with us” in the war on terror. They include Great Britain, Israel, Australia, India and Turkey. Each shares, at a fundamental level, our values. Like us, all are, to varying degrees, under assault from terrorist enemies. Like the United States, all face domestic pressure to accommodate — rather than confront — it.

Still, such nations constitute the core of a coalition of the willing that President Bush has resolved to mobilize to address the threats posed by terrorists like Saddam Hussein and his friends. The time has come to do so and, in the process, to make clear who is truly with us and who is prepared, instead, to be with our enemies.

Bush is asked to prevent hemispheric ‘Axis of Evil’ and back ouster of Venezuela’s Chavez

The Chairman of the House International Relations Committee has called on President Bush to disrupt the possible formation of an Axis of Evil in the Western Hemisphere, and to support the ouster of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

Concerned about Washington’s lack apparent concern for a hostile potential triad of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Chavez, and the possible election this weekend of the leftist Lula da Silva in Brazil, Rep. Henry Hyde urges Bush in a strongly-worded letter to break with the continued Clinton policy of tolerating Chavez.

“This is the time for the Bush administration to set the factual and historical record straight: the current regime of President Chavez is illegitimate because it is based upon the systematic violation of the Venezuelan constitution in force in 1999,” Hyde writes. “The Bush administration should also declare itself in sympathy with the pro-democratic civil-military coalition in Venezuela which seeks to restore democracy and should do so at once.”

According to Hyde, “all the pro-democracy elements of the society including the genuinely democratic political parties, the labor unions, business associations, and religious institutions have been gathered for two days in coalition with a group of active duty military officers of flag rank demanding that President Hugo Chavez resign and that new, free and open elections be held.”

Hyde is especially concerned that da Silva would make good on his statements to build and proliferate nuclear weapons: “There is a real prospect that Castro, Chavez, and Lula da Siva could constitute an axis of evil in the Americas which might soon have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles (which Brazil had developed ended in 1990). This is the time to support the prodemocratic coalition in Venezuela and to help the people of Brazil understand the truth about Chavez so that they do not make a similar mistake and elect another pro-Castro radical who will neither help the poor, nor help their economy, nor live at peace with democratic neighbors.”

Is a hemispheric Axis of Evil in the making?

With all the attention on Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, policymakers have been unable to focus on a massive ticking time bomb right in the American hemisphere.

On October 6, Brazilian voters are likely to elect as their president a bitterly anti-US populist who openly supports regimes on the State Department’s list of terrorist states. Inacio “Lula” da Silva, the presidential frontrunner, has called for his country to resume its nuclear weapons program, is considering the withdrawal of Brazil from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has stated that Brazil under his leadership should become a major military power and proliferator of advanced weapons technology. Brazil shelved its long-term nuclear weapons program a decade ago.

An alliance between a militaristic, left-wing Brazil under Lula; Communist Cuba, and dictatorial Venezuela bears the hallmarks of a nascent Axis of Evil in the Americas. So far, the National Security Council has shown no official concern.

Loose Lips’: U.S. Capabilities Vital to War on Terror Being Jeopardized by Dangerous Disclosures

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s Washington Post features a front page news article disclosing the existence of what it ominously calls a “shadow government” — a cadre of as many as 200 senior officials said to be working outside of the Nation’s capital in two secret locations. This is a most regrettable revelation as it will almost certainly lead to the compromise of one of the most sensitive and, arguably, one of them most important federal activities since September 11th: Ensuring the continuity of accountable and representative government in the face of terrorists’ manifest ambitions to “decapitate” our country by destroying its leadership.

While the Post exercised a modicum of restraint by acceding to Bush Administration demands not to identify the two locations, it is predictable that, by calling attention to the existence of such facilities, the paper has effectively challenged every other reporter on the planet to be the one to get credit for disclosing their precise whereabouts. One of the authors of the initial article, Barton Gellman, gave further, tantalizing hints in an interview on National Public Radio this morning: Both facilities are on the East Coast; one is in the military chain of command; one has been routinely updated, the other has obsolescent equipment dating from the Cold War days. Ready, set, go!

A few years back, in a fit of the “Cold War’s over” irresponsibility, congressional leaders saw fit to reveal the existence of a secret bunker at the Greenbrier Hotel complex, created covertly in the 1950s for the purpose of evacuating and surviving the legislative branch in the event of emergency. It can only be hoped — probably vainly — that some other such facility has been prepared in the meantime. If so, there is a chance that our constitutional form of government could continue to function at some level, even under the extremely difficult circumstances imposed by a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) attack on Washington.

More likely, no such preparation has been made, in light of the high costs associated with replicating compromised facilities and the extreme contempt for Continuity of Government (COG) activities expressed by people like former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State/White House Chief of Staff James Baker during the Bush 41 era and the Clinton national security team.

In World War II, those with knowledge of the movements of convoys were warned that “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” Today, in what some have called World War IV (III having been the Cold War), indiscreet comments about the existence and functioning of COG operations, personnel and sites invites their compromise. At best, that will mean relocation with all of the attendant expense and disruptions; at worst, it will mean the destruction of these vital “nodes” and with them, perhaps, the government we will then need more than ever.

Similar indiscretion has recently taken another casualty in the U.S. capabilities to wage the war on terrorism as effectively as possible: False, but widely repeated, claims by unnamed sources in the Defense Department that the recently established Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was planning to use disinformation to manipulate foreign media and governments. These unsubstantiated charges were repeated and amplified by the New York Times and other media to the point that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld felt the OSI had been so badly “crippled” that he had no choice but to shut it down.

Even though the Office of Strategic Influence was not going to engage in disinformation, the fact is that keeping such vital activities as strategic influence and continuity of government as far removed as possible from the enemies’ eyes is not only necessary to maximize the effectiveness of such operations. It is usually essential to their ability to operate at all. Joseph Persico op.ed. article published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal makes the case for secrecy in such matters. His injunction “Shhhhh!” should be followed scrupulously lest we be obliged to fight the war on terror disarmed of needed capabilities and more vulnerable to our enemies than we can afford to be.

Deception Is Part of the Art of War, But Shhhhhh!

By Joseph E. Persico
The Wall Street Journal, 28 February 2002

A scene takes place in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” in which a subordinate, Menas, sidles up to the Roman general, Pompey, and says he could easily cut the throats of Pompey’s rivals, including Marc Antony, thus leaving Pompey in power. Pompey responds that Menas should have just done it. “And not have spoke on’t! In me ’tis villany; in thee’t had been good service.”

This situation seems to reflect the fate of the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Influence. Good idea, chaps, if you’d just kept your mouths shut. But once it became public knowledge that part of the office’s function was, allegedly, to sow deliberate misinformation to confound our adversaries, President Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, backed off as if someone had handed them a dead rat. The falsehood is the weapon of nasty guys. Remember Hitler and his “Big Lie”?

The apparently swift rise and fall of the OSI may have given strategic lying a bad name. The real test is who is being lied to, about what, and, in history’s timeline, when.

Those now iconographic scenes of Allied troops successfully storming the Normandy beaches were underpinned by a lie of Paul Bunyanesque proportions. That American scrapper, Gen. George S. Patton, much to his chagrin was given command of a phony force which was supposedly preparing to invade occupied France across the Dover Straits, the narrowest neck of the English Channel as part of a deception plan labelled “Fortitude.” A theatrical set designer was fabricating thousands of rubber planes, tanks and artillery and inflating them near the Straits to reinforce the deception for spying eyes and aerial photographers.

It worked. Just one week before D-Day, Adolf Hitler confided to the Japanese ambassador to Germany, Hiroshi Oshima, that while the Allies might make diversionary feints in Norway, Brittany, and Normandy, the Allies actually “will come with the establishment of an all-out second front in the area of the straits of Dover.”

Oshima thereupon did what diplomats do. He cabled Hitler’s words back to the Japanese foreign office. The United States was cracking the Japanese code; and thus, the Allies learned that Hitler’s major force would not be awaiting them at Normandy, but, mistakenly, at the Dover Straits.

In the extremis of war, even lying to actual or potential allies has its own integrity. When, in 1940-41, his country stood alone and vulnerable, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s keenest objective was to draw the United States into the war against Germany. Indeed, he charged British intelligence with advancing that end.

Consequently, British spooks provided President Franklin Roosevelt with a purloined map showing how the Germans intended to divide South America into five Nazi vassal states; showed him a stolen document revealing a German plot to overthrow a pro-American regime in Bolivia; and even provided proof that the Germans already had 5,000 troops in Brazil poised to threaten the Panama Canal. FDR cited this intelligence in his speeches and fireside chats.

It was all a tissue of lies fabricated by the British. But Roosevelt was not about to scrutinize to death intelligence that would help him lead American public opinion along the course he wanted, war against Germany.

When Roosevelt was planning to invade North Africa in 1942, key to his strategy was to minimize French resistance to the seizure of these African colonies before the Germans could grab them. A key weapon? The baldfaced lie. Roosevelt had his secret emissary to the French, Robert Murphy, inflate the number of Americans in the U.S. invasion fleet by 400%, a disincentive for the French to put up much of a fight.

That’s the upside of disinformation employed against friend or foe. The dread downside is the “blowback” in which deceptions planted among one’s enemies — and expected to go no further — come back to haunt the planter. Unwitting allies may believe the lie and act on it to our detriment. Newspapers report the falsehood to unintended readers in the wrong countries. Our own government agencies, not in on the scam, act on erroneous information. All of this has happened, at one time or another, to U.S. disinformation efforts.

Even this newspaper was a blowback victim in the 1980s when it innocently reported a story based on Reagan administration disinformation concocted to show that Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi faced serious internal opposition. Likewise, the Pentagon’s inflated body counts and unfounded optimism during the Vietnam War, when subsequently exposed, served only to damage the military’s credibility. The blowback is the gas attack in which the wind wafts the poison back onto the sender.

But let’s be frank. Even though the Office of Strategic Influence has been strangled in its cradle, the function of deceiving our adversaries will live on in one form or another, practiced in one place or another, just as deception has gone on ever since the serpent misled Eve and the Greeks left the Trojans a gift horse. The point is, as Pompey said, “Don’t tell me, just do it.”

Mr. Persico is the author, most recently, of “Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage” (Random House, 2001).

Appoint Otto Reich

(Washington, D.C.): The collapse yesterday of the government of Argentina is but the latest reminder of the Nation’s urgent need to have in the senior ranks of the State Department a seasoned policy-maker with vast experience in turbulent Latin America and the President’s confidence. The fact that it coincided with the long-delayed end of the 2001 session of the U.S. Congress creates an opportunity for President Bush: Mr. Bush can finally install such an individual — Ambassador Otto Reich — in the post to which the President nominated him months ago, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

As the following editorial published in the Wall Street Journal on 13 December 2001 makes clear, the only reason Amb. Reich has not been on duty before now is because of an ideological vendetta waged against him by Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Western Hemisphere Affairs Subcommittee. Even as ominous economic, political and/or strategic developments in Latin American nations like Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru have demanded expert and competent leadership from the U.S. government, Sen. Dodd has blocked the Reich nomination. Worse yet, he has maliciously sullied the name of the man President Bush knows can provide such leadership while denying Amb. Reich a hearing in which to rebut false charges. The Senator’s motivation is transparent: He fears such a hearing would demonstrate to the world that it is Chris Dodd’s deplorable record on hemispheric affairs — not Otto Reich’s estimable one — that should be subjected to critical reviews.

Now that Sen. Dodd and his colleagues have finally left town, Mr. Bush should exercise his constitutional prerogative to make a recess appointment for Ambassador Reich to his State Department post. By so doing, he can simultaneously end a travesty of congressional abuse of power and give the Nation a man whose talents and abilities are more needed with every passing day.

While Caracas Burns

The Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2001

Argentina has a debt crisis, guerrilla movements are growing in Colombia and Peru, and on Monday Venezuela was all but shut down because of a nationwide protest against the creeping dictatorship of President Hugo Chavez. The success story that was once Latin America is unraveling by the day, thanks in part to a lack of U.S. leadership.

Yet while Caracas burns, the top U.S. policy maker for the region can’t assume his post for reasons of petty ideological revenge. Otto Reich — President Bush’s nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere — still can’t get a hearing in Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s subcommittee. Mr. Dodd’s petulance has gone beyond the usual Beltway payback and is now creating a leadership vacuum damaging to U.S. national security.

It’s hard to recall reading today’s headlines, but 10 years ago Latin America’s future looked bright. Democracy was on the rise, economies were growing and the era of military coups seemed to be over. The countries did this mostly on their own, but U.S. leadership was crucial. The U.S. nurtured free-market economic ideas and helped against Marxist rebels. That trend stopped during the 1990s, as the Clinton Administration mostly ignored the region for more glamorous priorities. The result today is a region threatened by repression, violence and economic decline.

Beltway fiddler

In Colombia, Marxist guerrillas now control, and claim to own, a portion of the country as large as Switzerland. Any negotiations with the government, they maintain, are about who controls the rest of Colombia, and to prove it they launch terrorist strikes, kidnap or kill innocents and sabotage electricity and oil pipelines. The narcotics trade and guerrillas are both now spilling out of Colombia into Ecuador.

Shining Path terrorism is returning to the countryside in Peru, where the State Department has issued a travel warning to Americans. The triple border area of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina is home to a number of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist cells. In Argentina, the government is bankrupt, tariff barriers on consumer goods have been hiked to 35% and a bank run has triggered capital controls.

But nowhere have conditions deteriorated faster than in Venezuela under President Chavez, whose role model is Fidel Castro. Responding to Monday’s nationwide strike, Mr. Chavez donned military fatigues as fighter planes roared overhead. “Now we will begin tightening the screws,” he said. “Nothing stops this revolution.” He has already passed laws that will allow him to confiscate private farmland, and on Tuesday Fidel himself paid a visit and praised his handiwork.

As for Central America, crime and kidnapping rings are chasing out foreign investment, the great hope of so many jobless poor. Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide — restored to power by Bill Clinton — behaves like a mafia don in his destitute nation, where critics of the government are murdered with impunity. The refugee exodus has resumed, with the U.S. Coast Guard reportedly intercepting more than 300 this month.

Despite anti-Yankee rhetoric for local consumption, Latin America has long relied on the U.S. for leadership. The region is in enough trouble now that if Secretary of State Colin Powell didn’t have a war to worry about, he would have no choice but to make Latin America a priority. And the crisis explains why Messrs. Bush and Powell are both adamant in supporting Mr. Reich, a Cuban immigrant and former ambassador to Venezuela with a lifetime of experience and contacts in the region.

Mr. Dodd knows that Mr. Reich would be confirmed if he got to the Senate floor, which is why he wants to block even a hearing. He and Latin America aide Janice O’Connell bear a grudge against the Cuban-American going back to their days on opposite sides of the battle over Central America. But rather than face that difference squarely, Mr. Dodd’s strategy has been to smear Mr. Reich’s reputation, accusing him in a letter to this paper of, among other things, being soft on terrorism. U.S. officials say the public record refutes those charges, which may be why Mr. Dodd doesn’t want Mr. Reich to get his chance to make his case in the Senate.

We keep wondering when Mr. Dodd’s Democratic betters are going to call him to account for such behavior. It’d be nice to know, for example, how Florida Democrats Bob Graham and Bill Nelson feel about this treatment of a Cuban American. Tom Daschle recently met with Mr. Reich, but the majority leader has been reluctant to overrule his party’s junior barons when they get the bit in their mouths.

Mr. Bush has the recourse of a recess appointment for Mr. Reich once the Senate leaves town. Given the worsening state of Latin America, and Mr. Dodd’s irresponsibility, the President can justify such a move in the urgent national interest.