The menace of the New World Order

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday April 18, 2002 19:22 by Vincent Brown - Irish Times

We got a glimpse of the menace of the New World Order last weekend, says Vincent Browne. On the morning of Friday, Pan-American Day, President Bush hailed the Democratic Charter of the Organisation of American States (OAS approved by OAS members in Lima, Peru, on September 11th last (coincidentally).

. On the morning of Friday, Pan-American Day, President Bush hailed the Democratic Charter of the Organisation of American States (OAS approved by OAS members in Lima, Peru, on September 11th last (coincidentally).

This charter proclaimed democratic principles and the commitment of the OAS to support democracy throughout the Americas, to investigate the overthrow of any democratically elected government of a member-country and, if necessary, to suspend the offender's membership.

On Friday night Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, elected with a huge democratic mandate, on the basis of a constitution also endorsed by the overwhelming majority, was overthrown in a military coup. He had antagonised the US by condemning the "slaughter of innocents" in the bombardment of Afghanistan; he had rallied OPEC to push up the price of oil and in that connection had visited other OPEC countries, including Iraq, Iran and Libya; and he had expressed open admiration for Fidel Castro. He had also regularly castigated what he called the "savage neo-liberalism" of the Washington controlled World Bank and IMF.

On Saturday morning South American presidents meeting in Costa Rica condemned the coup and reaffirmed their commitment to the Democratic Charter. As they met, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, uttered not a word of condemnation of the coup and claimed Chavez had provoked the crisis. Fleischer observed, with implicit approval, "a transitional civilian government has been installed".

Later on Saturday at a meeting of OAS ambassadors, the US ambassador to the OAS, Roger Noriega, chastised his fellow ambassadors for being more concerned about the coup than they were about Chavez's allegedly anti-democratic behaviour in the immediate prelude to the coup (according to a report in the Washington Post).

Following the restoration of Chavez to office on Sunday, the US administration sought to recover lost ground. "We'll be guided by the Inter-American Democratic Charter," said a State Department spokesman, Philip Reeker. There had not been a word about the charter from Friday morning, until the coup was found to have failed on Sunday.

With a little luck we will know much more about what was behind the coup in a few months after Chavez has conducted an inquiry and the perpetrators of the coup have been put on trial. And it is likely that the Bush administration will suffer even more embarrassment.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that senior members of the administration had met several times in recent months with those who led the coup. There were conflicting accounts of what the administration officials said. One version claimed that the Venezuelans were told they would have to abide by constitutional processes. Another said the Venezuelans were given informal signals to proceed (with the coup).

Given the retrospective endorsement there was for the coup, isn't it unlikely there was not prospective endorsement as well? All the more so when you remember the impertinence of the American ambassador in Caracas telling the President to "shut his mouth" on the bombing of Afghanistan and the menace of Colin Powell towards Chavez when he (Powell) recently gave evidence to a congressional committee.

Such spectacular hypocrisy at the heart of American foreign policy hardly comes as a surprise to those of us who have been critics of American foreign policy. What perhaps is a surprise is the response of that former bastion of American liberalism, the New York Times. On Saturday morning an editorial on the Venezuelan coup opened with the sentence: "With yesterday's resignation of President Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator". An extraordinary inversion of the reality, which was that a democratically elected President had been overthrown by an actual dictator.

We understand the trauma of September 11th, especially for New Yorkers. But to have derailed judgment and common sense so profoundly? Even within the cerebral ivory towers of the New York Times leader-writers? Hardly surprising then that the slaughter of innocents in Afghanistan went largely unnoticed and certainly uncriticised in the New York Times. That the barbarisms of Israel inflicted on the Palestinians are barely chastised. Mohammed Atta and his associates did more than destroy the Twin Towers and kill 3,000 innocents on September 11th; they subverted the liberal compassionate conscience of the US.

They did a little more as well. They cowed most of the rest of the world into subservience and/or silence. What did the European Union do in response to the coup in Venezuela? It sat on its hands.

I was in Caracas two weeks ago and observed the discrepancies between wealth and poverty on a scale I had not seen before, not even in South Africa or Dublin. Chavez has attempted to do something about this in the teeth of opposition from the powerful elite, who are supported by Washington, and the media, which are controlled by the elite and virulently hostile. He has won this round, but they will try again and, next time, Washington will be better prepared. And that's the way it is in the New World Order.

© The Irish Times