I guess there are certain things you just can’t say – no matter how much sense they make.
Everyone who is anyone is repudiating remarks made by Pat Robertson in which he suggested it might not be a bad idea to knock off Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez.
The State Department was quick to distance itself from the statement. The Defense Department explained that it doesn’t do these things. And lots of commentators had a good yuck over the whole controversy.
Jesse Jackson, the master of the non sequitur, had this to say: “This is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ball game.”
Yet, I doubt many Americans would contend it is always, unequivocally wrong to kill foreign leaders.
Can someone tell me it would have been wrong to assassinate Hitler?
Is someone going to make the case that killing Stalin would have been a bad thing?
Given the cost of the war in Iraq, would someone explain why it would not have been better to knock off Saddam Hussein if we had the chance?
Would someone other than Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton or Jamie Gorelick make the case that if we had Osama bin Laden in our crosshairs we shouldn’t pull the trigger?
Let’s face facts. There have been many times in history when the smart move would have been taking out a foreign leader, perhaps saving many innocent lives in the process.
I think Pat Robertson raises an interesting point about Chavez.
One could make the case that he is the most dangerous man in the world today – right up there with Kim Jong-il of North Korea, bin Laden of al-Qaida and Mahmood Ahmadinejad of Iran.
Kim is a madman with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles to fire them. Bin Laden has already killed more Americans than any other man on the planet and his thirst for more blood is hardly quenched. And, if you don’t know who Chavez is, imagine Fidel Castro sitting on the world’s fourth-largest oil supply, able to buy any weapons system imaginable and networking with the Chinese, al-Qaida and Iran, and attempting to build an anti-U.S., Soviet-style bloc in Latin America.
This is a man who, according to his former pilot, paid $1 million to al-Qaida after Sept. 11 – a kind of reward for a job well done.
He rigs elections in his country and has brought nothing but misery to his people – expropriating millions of acres of privately held land, jailing dissidents, banning civilian ownership of guns, bedding down with Colombia’s narco-terrrorists, propping up Castro in better style than the old Soviet Union ever did, buying nuclear material from Spain and attempting to build a 2-million-man army in a country not threatened by any external forces.
The chances are excellent that some day – sooner or later – American troops are going to have to deal with Chavez.
So what is absurd about suggesting that eliminating this one monster would be a better alternative?
Is it crazy to talk about it? Is it a bad idea to let the American people know we have, right here in our own Western Hemisphere, a potential threat to our national security?
I don’t think Pat Robertson suggested assassinating Hugo Chavez because the TV evangelist is bloodthirsty. I think he suggested it because he is not.
We live in a very dangerous world – a world more dangerous because of people like Hugo Chavez.
There would be nothing immoral about killing him.
In fact, if indeed he aided al-Qaida as charged, we have a moral obligation as a nation to do him in.
But we won’t.
Why?
Because our national leaders lack the courage to take out monsters like Kim, bin Laden, Saddam and Ahmadinejad. They fear a war like that could come home to haunt them. Instead, lots of innocent men have to lose their lives in wars where surrogates are asked to take the risks and do the fighting.
Strange world.
