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PrintJune 12, 2008
The Curious Behavior of Hugo Chavez
"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident." -Silver Blaze, by A. Conan Doyle
Hugo Chavez's abrupt switch to moderate and rational speech is understandably disconcerting. Belligerent egomaniacs do not suddenly lapse into reasonableness, although they may slyly pretend to do so. Therefore, in a recent American Thinker blog item, Thomas Lifson speculated that Chavez's real motive may be to defuse forthcoming evidence of his involvement with FARC.
However, I suspect that, as in the old wheelbarrow story or the joke about Holmes and Watson on a camping trip , the real explanation may too simple to be obvious.
Hugo Chavez wants Barack Obama to be our next president. So do Vladmir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Laden, and all of the enemies of the United States. Obama is an Americaphobe's dream come true: a nice compliant let's-sit-down-and-talk president who will submit to endless negotiations that will accomplish nothing while giving our enemies time to carry out their schemes for undermining us.. Of course they cannot actually praise Obama; even Fidel Castro had the good sense to qualify his endorsement. But our enemies realize that they can help his campaign by ceasing to threaten or even by seeming to reform.
The smartest thing that Chavez and Co. can do this summer is keep quiet and not make any waves, so that the American public will forget that we have any foreign enemies. McCain will then appear to be a fool and a warmonger for ranting about threats that will seem to have disappeared. And if Obama is given the luxury of not having to respond to such problems and is allowed to confine his campaign to domestic issues, his chances of victory will be greatly enhanced.
The sole exception to this conspiracy of silence may be Islamic terrorists, who, despite warnings to the contrary, still believe that the American people can be cowed by terrorism-perhaps because their own people are so susceptible to it. Nonetheless, they may be shrewd enough to perceive the advantage of lulling the American voting public into a false sense of security by curbing their activities until the election is over. Even Ahmadinejad seems to be quieting down a bit and one of his underlings, the commander of the Quds terror group of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, has declared that he will bide his time until he can deal with the "next president"-and you can guess who he's hoping that will be.
I predict that this will be a quiet summer. That terrorist activity in Iraq and Afghanistan will diminish and that our enemies elsewhere will not say or do anything to alarm us. But we must not be fooled. And we must not allow the voting public to be so blatantly hoodwinked.
