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U.S. Has Plan For Military Conflict With
Venezuela:
Pentagon to Venezuela: Who, Us?
By William M. Arkin
11/03/05 "Washington
Post" -- -- Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Donald
Rumsfeld are like two alcoholics drinking together, pathetically
doing the only thing they know how to do, egged on by their presence
at the bar.
Yesterday, I wrote that "The Pentagon has begun contingency planning
for potential military conflict with Venezuela as part of a broad
post-Iraq evaluation of strategic threats to the United States."
According to the Miami Herald, "Pentagon spokesmen Wednesday reacted
with deep skepticism to [my report] … that the Department of Defense
is drawing up plans for a potential military conflict with
Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez."
The Pentagon spokesman needs to do more work.
There is not a doubt that military planners are doing what military
planners do: looking at the world through the prism of potential
threat, fitting countries to their models of action and reaction,
toiling away they think in secret, considering the "what ifs." This
is particularly the case after the failure of 9/11. It is
particularly true now that the military is mentally moving on from
Iraq, looking to the future.
The assumption of outsiders -- including Chavez and many in Latin
American -- is that this uniquely American military process is
purely imperial: Of course the United States is planning the take
down Chavez, they say. It is the history of intervention. It is
routine. No country escapes the American bulls-eye.
To insiders like Rumsfeld though, top secret eying of a hostile
Venezuela is only prudent. As I said yesterday, Venezuela possesses
everything that makes it "strategically" important: it has oil; it
is leftist; it is critical of the United States; it is buying from
(and threatening to sell to) the bad guys; it is in our own back
yard. Strategic may be the most overused word in the international
lexicon, but in this case strategically important is assumed to mean
military. And military means either ally or threat.
In other words, Hugo Chavez and Donald Rumsfeld need each other.
Chavez has for months been using conflict with the United States and
the resulting and associated threats -- real or imagined -- of
assassinations, military coups, oil sabotage and invasion to
mobilize and organize the Venezuelan people and strengthen his hold
on power.
Rumsfeld is equally opportunistic, carrying out his duty and
unflinchingly and unapologetically seeing the world in the way that
he does: There may be no "plan" for an assassination, coup, sabotage
or invasion, and that in itself is a problem to be rectified. The
United States military can not and should not be caught with its
pants down.
Chavez and Rumsfeld are also joined by their diametrical views. Take
the response to hurricane Katrina. To Chavez (and many others), the
sluggish American response represents an intentional lack of regard
for the poor and the effect of the Iraq war. Chavez has rhetorically
used Katrina to pander to his supporters and to criticize the
administration. And key to his argument is to say: look at Iraq,
when the Pentagon wants to move, it can move quickly.
Rumsfeld looks at Iraq and Katrina and sees exactly the opposite: It
took the military months -- and wasn't it really years since the end
of the Iraq war in 1991? -- to plan for, to move its forces, to
prepare its logistics, to build-up its pieces to invade. Sure if the
United States had many months to prepare for Katrina, it could have
done wonders…
Lack of preparedness is Rumsfeld's nightmare. That's the whole point
of the ferocious new government planning to improve domestic
military response and to write new natural disaster plans. That's
the whole justification for President Bush to order the military to
prepare for every contingency from acts of God to a collective runny
nose.
In the ways of the United States military, a fundamentally
hierarchical organization, the "who" of who does what is extremely
important. The regional "combatant" commands compete for resources
and attention, and since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, no
command has been more on the losing end than U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).
First the command was kicked out of Panama, then it lost much of the
Caribbean and the waters of South America to other "homeland"
defense commands, then Rumsfeld floated the idea that it should be
eliminated altogether in the creation of a new super "Americas
Command."
Now Venezuela conveniently gives SOUTHCOM the one thing that every
combatant command craves: combat. Maybe this won't result in a
full-fledged war plan, but as I said yesterday, one of Rumsfeld's
post-9/11 initiatives has been to push the military more into
thinking about "adaptive" planning to be able to move without the
months and years of preparations. Venezuela, even a generic
Venezuela as an example, is a wonderful test case. That is why it is
referred to as a "pop up," an unanticipated threat. I have seen the
term "pop up" being used for years to describe small scale
contingencies.
I have been asked to identify the document that specifically
identified Venezuela: It is an internal military briefing titled
"The FY08-13 POM" and dated October 2005. POM stands for Program
Objective Memorandum. According to the Defense Department, the POM
is the primary document used by the services to submit programming
proposals, analyze missions and justify allocation of resources.
Is it possible that the characterization of Venezuela as a "pop up"
threat and as a "rogue" state will turn into nothing? That this is
just the work of over-zealous or opportunistic or lazy staff
officers looking to justify their existence, their budgets, and
their proposals? It is possible. That is why I wrote about the
thoughtless inclusion of Venezuela in war planning in the first
place: to make the point that such floundering about for new
threats, and such opportunism, demands the intervention of cooler
heads.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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