A fine and honest post Tom,

But fatally holed below the water-line by your central assumption..........Ie.. that your government.. and mine.......... had to do some unsavoury things in the past to counter-act the "communist menace"........but with the Cold War over it has stopped doing so.

Our governments continued, and indeed increased this strategy and use it today.... ( After all, why abandon the strategy that "Won" the cold war?)

We simply switched our targets.

For instance...

I knew damn little about Venezuala in the past, could point to it on the map, knew it had large reserves of Oil, apparently of a particularly dirty, tarry type, not a lot more then that...

Then I saw the news reports....Corrupt president of a south American country evicted from power after his supporters take to the streets shooting at the opposition.

I sighed, thought, "Good! Another dictator gone.......that's one down in a long list" and got on with my life, vaguely troubled by the fact it was a military coup, it didn't seem likely the military in that part of the world would intervene in support of Values I hold dear such as democracy, ... they never have before.. but what the hell........

THEN........the people of that nation take to the streets.........take on thier own military and force the re-instatement of a President they had elected not once but twice.

AND....... we discover that the vast majority of the gunshot wounds to the people in that demonstration (According to autopsies) came from high velocity military style weaponry on a trajectory that placed the shooter in a very high position, probably on the roof tops overlooking the demonstration... and the only people up there were the Army and other "security" forces.

NEXT......... we learn that all those involved in the coup had been recieving for some months beforehand, aid money and advice, from the Bush Administration. aid, advice and money.

NOW.. that same administration is grumbling that Chavez'es election wins are in some way "illegitimate" and "anti-democratic"

THIS......... from the BUSH Administration?

If any other country had a head of state in power, elected after a gerry mandering scandal in a province run by his brother, and whose father had been the head of that nations secret services.. we'd be treating that man and any claims he made as to his own "legimacey" with utter contempt.

Tom, your Bush administration got caught up to it's neck in a plot to remove by force the elected government of a nation and replace it with one more to it's own tastes... and as so often .. Oil.. and profits ...... were at the root of it.

As I said, your comfortable assumption that the Us no longer intervenes in the affairs of other nations in ways damageing to that nation is Bogus.

How the hell do you think the peoples of Venzuala NOW view the US? As a benign presence? I don't think so... and would imagine most of the other peoples in that part of the world too view US activities with increased fear and suspicion.