I was always vehemently opposed to the Iraq conflict, wrongly labeled a war, and now that we have killed, in a year and a half, about 1/3rd the number of people that Saddam purportedly killed in two decades it may be time for the US to look for another way of solving the problem.
The source below was taken from a different topic. One thing Iraq and Venezuela have in common is oil. Now the US has already said it means to turn that oil wealth over to the Iraqi people...choke...gurgle :barf:.
It looks to me like Hugo is doing a pretty good job in Venezuela of using the wealth from the oil to better the condition of the people. Why not develop a plan based on Mr. Chavez's design and send it to the UN to deliberate. After all, before people can be "liberated" and participate in a democracy they have to have food, health and housing. The opposition/insurgency would be defused as well.
This would also be an answer to the Republican's question: "What do we do now"?
http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:IY6Ug7GQNPUJ:www.alternet.org/story/19585+Hugo+Ch%C3%A1vez&hl=enI knew Chavez would win the referendum when I met Olivia Delfino in a poor Caracas barrio that our international election delegation visited. Olivia came running out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm. "Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez," she insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to her home and a bank loan to fix the roof so it wouldn't leak. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called "Rescatando la sonrisa" – recovering the smile – for the first time in her life she was able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job training program to become a nurse's assistant.
Getting more and more animated, Olivia dragged me over to a poster on the wall showing Hugo Chavez with a throng of followers and a list of Venezuela's new social programs that read: "The social programs are ours, let's defend them." Then slowly and laboriously, she began reading the list of social programs: literacy, health care, job training, land reform, subsidized food, small loans. I asked her if she was just learning to read and write as part of the literacy program. That's when she started crying. "Can you imagine what's it has meant to me, at 52 years old, to now have a chance to read?" she said. "It's transformed my life."
Walk through poor barrios in Venezuela and you'll hear the same stories over and over. The very poor can now go to a designated home in the neighborhood to pick up a hot meal every day. The elderly have monthly pensions that allow them to live with dignity. Young people can take advantage of greatly expanded free college programs. And with 13,000 Cuban doctors spread throughout the country and reaching over half the population, the poor now have their own family doctors on call 24-hours a day – doctors who even make house calls. This heath care, including medicines, is all free.
The programs are being paid for with the income from Venezuela's oil, which is at an all-time high. Previously, the nation's oil wealth benefited only a small, well-connected elite who kept themselves in power for 40 years through an electoral duopoly. The vast majority in this oil-rich nation remained poor, disenfranchised, and disempowered. With the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 on a platform of sharing the nation's oil wealth with the poorest, all that has changed. The poor are now not only recipients of these programs, they are actively engaged in running them. They're turning abandoned buildings into neighborhood centers, running community kitchens, volunteering to teach in the literacy programs and organizing neighborhood health brigades.
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