Venezuela’s Bad Choices

Venezuela’s president has hobnobbed with Moammar Kadafi and Saddam Hussein and blasted the United States for its war in Afghanistan and now is urging the State Department to lobby Congress on his behalf--eliciting the diplomatic equivalent of “Come again? “

Hugo Chavez, a former paratrooper who demagogued his way into the Venezuelan presidency in 1998, wants his nation to be included in the special tax breaks and other privileges granted certain South American nations under the Andean Region Trade Preferences Act. The State Department has responded by reminding him of his troubling speeches and decisions.

Since he took power, Chavez has conducted himself like a minor league Fidel Castro, snubbing the United States at every opportunity. At April’s Summit of the Americas in Quebec, for example, he was the sole dissenting voice among 33 heads of state when the gathering agreed that the Free Trade Area of the Americas should go into effect in 2005. He argued that the pact benefited the U.S. and Canada at the expense of the poor nations of the hemisphere. More disturbingly, he has defended Carlos the Jackal, the notorious Venezuelan terrorist currently jailed in Paris.

Everyone is free to express his opinions and choose his friends. But at a moment when President Bush has said that nations are either with the anti-Al Qaeda coalition or with the terrorists, the Venezuelan president’s choices are particularly unfortunate. Someone in the State Department should explain to Chavez the meaning of the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”