US launches major military exercises near Venezuala

[Annie]

Here we go again....

Annie

US launches major military exercises in the Caribbean as a warning to
Venezuela and Cuba

By Jorge Martin
Thursday, 30 March 2006
http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/us_military_exercises_venezuela_cuba. htm

According to a press release by the US Southern Command on Monday,
March 27: "A U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group will deploy from the U.S. east
coast to the Caribbean Sea to conduct Operation Partnership of the
Americas from early April through late May 2006." The strike group will be
composed of "aircraft carrier USS George Washington with embarked air
wing, Cruiser USS Monterey, Destroyer USS Stout, and Frigate USS
Underwood". This means that the US Navy will be sending 4 ships, one of them
carrying 60 fighter planes, and a total of 6,500 soldiers on a major
military exercise in the Caribbean starting in the next few weeks. (see:
U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group to make Caribbean deployment)

The stated aims of this exercise are: "enhancing military-to-military
relationships with regional partner nations, improving operational
readiness, and fostering good will." By "fostering good will" what is meant
is sending a strong message to Venezuela and Cuba. The commander of the
US Southcom General Bantz Craddock has on many occasions attacked the
Venezuelan government. The decision to send this unusually large force
to the Caribbean was announced just two weeks after General Craddok
spoke at a US Senate committee hearing in which he called the Venezuelan
government a "destabilizing force" because of its moves in the
international arena, as well as ongoing efforts to purchase weapons, particularly
from China. "The purchase of military equipment has not been a
transparent process. This is a destabilizing factor in a region where nations
are making joint efforts to face international threats, rather than
fighting each other," he stated. And he added: "We are not fully convinced
that such ample and large purchases have an origin in Venezuelan
national defense concerns."

In a press conference during his visit to Uruguay in June 2005 he was
even more specific: "I do not see Cuba as a military threat to the
United States, I do not see Venezuela as a military threat to the United
States, what I do see is an influence in Latin America that creates,
potentially creates instability and uncertainty, because in Cuba, obviously
it is a totalitarian state, a communist state, and in Venezuela it
appears that democratic processes and institutions are at risk. That has
great opportunity to create, again, instability and uncertainty
throughout the region if those processes are exported. So we are concerned, and
we believe the neighbors in the region should also be concerned." In a
thinly disguised threat of military intervention, General Craddock
added: "The military aspect is to create conditions to allow other
solutions to work, economic, political, social".
(http://montevideo.usembassy.gov/usaweb/paginas/431-00EN.shtml).

In the recently released Strategy for National Security, 2006 document
Washington clearly sees Venezuela as a target: “In Venezuela, a
demagogue inundated with petrol money is undermining democracy and trying to
destabilize the region.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html)

It is clear that the current military exercises must be seen in this
context. This is recognised even by right military defence analysts from
the US. An article in the Virginian Pilot newspaper quoted one of them:
"The presence of a U.S. carrier task force in the Caribbean will
definitely be interpreted as some sort of signal by the governments of Cuba
and Venezuela,” said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a
pro-defense think tank in Washington, who added: "the fact we are doing it
now will be interpreted by Castro and Chavez as indicative of some sort
of U.S. plan, or initiative, or whatever you want to call it". (GW
strike group will head south for training, Jack Dorsey, Virginian Pilot,
March 28th)

The Spirit of Freedom? The US Southcom already has a number of military
bases within reach of Venezuelan territory. These include smaller
"Cooperative Security Locations" based in Aruba and Curaçao off the coast of
Venezuela, in Manta in Ecuador and in El Salvador, together with larger
bases in Soto Cano in Honduras, Guantánamo in Cuba and in several
locations in Colombia. Southcom has just issued a new "theater command
strategy", part of which has been declassified. Objective number one is to
guarantee that "regional energy supplies will flow freely into
international markets and will not be targets of aggression." Essential to
meeting this security objective, says Southcom, is improving the ability of
"partner nation security forces to protect critical infrastructure" of
the energy industry in the region. This clearly affects Venezuela,
which is the 3rd largest supplier of oil to the United States.

A number of objectives have not been declassified, but then number six
is to "prevent rogue states from supporting terrorist organizations".
Considering there are no "rogue" states in Latin America, this can only
be a reference to Venezuela, which Washington has accused, without
presenting any proof, of supporting the Farc guerrillas in Colombia
(described by Gen Braddock as "narco-terrorists").

Usually the corporate media dismisses president Chavez's warnings of
the danger of a US military intervention against the Bolivarian
revolution in Venezuela. But information publicly available shows that this is a
very real danger. Washington is not likely to start an open war in
Venezuela at this particular time, when they are bogged down in a war they
cannot win in Iraq, but they are certainly making preparations. One way
in which military intervention can take place is by artificially
fostering autonomist demands in Zulia, the oil rich Venezuelan state on the
border with Colombia. Local politicians in this region (one of only two
with an opposition governor) have been busy demanding a referendum on
autonomy. A scenario could be envisaged in which they declare
independence unilaterally and ask for foreign intervention to guarantee their
"democratic rights". Such an intervention would be easier to justify and
could even take place under the guise of "peace-keeping" (as is
currently the case with the imperialist intervention in Haiti).

This would obviously not be an easy task. Chavez has already pointed
out, correctly, that the day after military intervention by the US
against Venezuela, the whole continent would be in flames. Latin America is
witnessing a shift to the left with mass movements, general strikes,
insurrections, elections of governments which are seen as being left wing
by the masses, etc.

The United States is seriously worried about the impact the Venezuelan
revolution is having in the rest of Latin America. They are accusing
Chavez of interfering in the election campaigns in Peru and Mexico, as
they accused him of interfering in the elections in December in Bolivia
in which Evo Morales won a landslide victory. The accusation that the
Venezuelan government is directly financing candidates in other countries
is obviously wrong. But what is certainly true is that the Bolivarian
revolution has raised the hopes of the masses of workers and peasants
throughout the continent and beyond. It has provided an example that it
is possible to challenge the policies imposed by Washington. In previous
decades a familiar pattern would take place in Latin America. The
masses of workers and peasants went on the move and elected a progressive
government which would soon be overthrown by a military coup engineered
from the US. This had a demoralising effect on the mass movement in the
continent. The Bolivarian revolution has also changed that with the
defeat of the military coup against Chavez in April 2002 by the mass
movement of the people in the streets.

And the effect is not only in Latin America but also in the United
States where millions of Latinos live and work, many of them keeping links
with their countries of origin. The enormous hundreds of thousands of
Latin American immigrants in the United States who have been
demonstrating and going on strike for their rights in the last few weeks, would
not remain idle if the US staged a military provocation against
Venezuela.

All this makes the Bolivarian revolution even more dangerous to the
ruling class in the United Sates. They are carrying out careful
preparations to put an end to it. These include a campaign of relentless
pressure, through the media, through diplomacy and economic sabotage, trying to
prevent the purchase of weapons by Venezuela, etc. And the current
military exercises in the Caribbean are clearly part of these preparations,
both as a threat and as a concrete preparation for future military
intervention.