Is Venezuela the Next Egypt?

[Geee]

Human Events:

The removal of Hosni Mubarak’s rather dour and colorless 30-year-old dictatorship in Egypt has filled our foreign policy discourse with a lot of school yard idealism about “winds of change,” along with Martin Luther King quotes from President Obama. But few appear to have awakened to a truly disturbing reality. Dictators falling in Egypt, Tunisia, and possibly Yemen, are U.S. allies.

Recent protests in Iran and Syria have been crushed, and little has been heard in Libya, where Muammar al-Gaddafi has ruled for 40 years. He is catching up to Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who has been in power for more than half a century and has tutored his oil-rich Venezuelan successor, President Hugo Chavez, in how to break successive protest movements, including a particularly nasty oil strike in 2002, with repressive tactics developed in Havana, Tripoli, Damascus, and Tehran. Members of Hezbollah serve alongside Cuban advisers in Chavez’s government, having trained and commanded his "Bolivarian" political militia.

Democratic influences can be blocked by regimes that are brutal enough. That know how to harness significant sectors of their populations against change, using all the military and propaganda tools at their disposal to mobilize their people into a permanent war footing against the U.S. Had Mubarak been advised by the other side, he might have survived the stress test.