Sunday, July 21, 2013

Threatening Venezuela

The Spanish paper ABC has a source claiming John Kerry called Elías Jaua and went off on Venezuela, detailing the ways in which the U.S. would punish the country if it tried to get Edward Snowden there.

If the report is true, then the Obama administration has truly gone off the deep end. What makes me wonder is the threat to stop refining Venezuelan oil. This doesn't seem like a legitimate threat to me given the economic dislocation it would create in the United States, not to mention the diplomatic disaster abroad. Maybe Snowden is that important to Obama, but I am not totally convinced. I hope he's not.

If it is true, then it is a particularly crude type of threat that reminds me of the Bush administration's counterproductive and self-defeating threats against Chile and Mexico to support the Iraq War.

ABC has periodically published controversial stories based on mysterious "sources," especially about the imminent demise of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. So they're 1 for 2 at the moment.





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