Pat Robertson, with his now infamous quote about ‘taking out’ Hugo Chavez, highlighted not just the sentiment of Pat Robertson, but decades of U.S. policy in Latin America.

Hugo Chavez fears for his life not because he’s paranoid, but because in the last hundred years, when the U.S. didn’t like a leader in Latin America, they did what they could to ‘take that leader out.’

Folks who don’t believe me ought to take an afternoon and do some quality reading on the subject of Guatemalan history. Plenty of coups and plenty of ‘taking ‘em out’.

Frankly, the chances of Chavez being assassinated, thanks to Robertson’s comment, have now been significantly lessened. Because if something really does happen, all fingers would inevitably turn toward our very own state department and the CIA.

Fact of the matter is this: U.S. policy and current administrative agendas are right in line with the kind of suggestions we hear from Robertson.

And as cynical as I may sound, the reason for U.S. shady policy in Latin America has not been to protect freedom. Folks, it’s all about corporate greed. In Guatemala, it was about the natives getting all uppity and unionizing. Imagine! The nerve! (Especially, when the things they were organizing about had to do with not letting the higher-ups spray pesticides WHILE they were working in the fields.) Unions would most assuredly make the cost of our bananas get way too high. Time to back a coup so that we can ‘take out’ the leader who is letting folks organize.

And, sadly, our current administration cares far less about ‘Iraqi freedom’ than they do about the status of the second largest supply of oil in the world. We did not invade Iraq because we were overly concerned about our brothers and sisters in Iraq, but because of oil. Not only that, but all the other ‘reasons’ Bush has made up for the Iraq invasion have now simply fallen away.

We ‘took Saddam out’ all right, but for all the wrong reasons. Robertson has exposed the underbelly of U.S. policy, for better or for worse. At least now Chaves has a fighting chance. He’s not another Saddam, but a democratically elected leader of his people. Let’s hope democracy doesn’t start becoming a threat to our country. Democratically elected Hugo Chavez is not a ‘weapon of mass destruction.’

It is not by some random consequence that Robertson is an ally to the Bush administration. Pat Robertson and George Bush are ideological look-alikes. Robertson’s Christian Coalition is a strong and reliable subset of W’s base. And that’s a fact.

According to the Associated Press in an article published today, Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) argues that Iraq looks like Vietnam did a generation ago.

He suggests that we need a lot more than determination to succeed in Iraq. Read this quote from Hagel in today’s AP article:

… “Stay the course” is not a policy. “By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq … we’re not winning.”

I think most folks, Republicans and Democrats alike would agree with Senator Hagel. We cannot stay in Iraq without a clear sense of what is possible and what it will take to make those possibilties a reality. If we continue to do what we’re doing now and expect that somehow we’ll have different results after four years, we’ll most assuredly face disappointment; many more senseless deaths and unnecessary casualties. (AND WE CANNOT STAY IN A WAR TO HONOR THE SACRIFICES OF ALREADY FALLEN SOLDIERS; THAT KIND OF THINKING LEADS US TO A DEAD END, LITERALLY.)

A veteran of the Vietnam war who received two Purple Hearts, Hagel is no stranger to the realities of war and the dangers of ignoring these realities. On both sides of the isle, senators and members of congress MUST continue to call for truth-telling. The time for bickering about whether we should’ve gone to war in the first place is over; it is time tell the truth about what’s happening now.

Telling the American public that we’re ‘doing pretty well over there’ and that we simply need to ’stay the course’ is not truth-telling. Without a specific plan and a reasonably specific time table, no one knows when enough is enough. I probably don’t agree with most of Senator Hagel’s policies, but I agree one hundred percent with his call for truth-telling. Let’s hope many more senators and members of congress join him in his search for the truth about the war in Iraq. Because without the truth, we’ll accomplish nothing.

1. Homosexuality: is it a sin?
2. Abortion: should it be legal?
3. Iraq: should we have invaded?
4. Iraq: when should our troops come home?
5. Terrorism: what’s the best way to respond to it?
6. Taxes: who should be taxed and how much?
7. Supreme Court: who should be appointed?
8. Social Security: what should happen to it?
9. Global Warming: what should be done about it?
10. AIDS in Africa: how should we help?

In my opinion, these are the issues that will lead a good percentage of Americans into heated discussions with each other. How one answers the questions above generally serves as an indicator of whether one is liberal or conservative. I wonder what our ‘top 10′ list will look like ten or twenty years from now. Any guesses??

With recent surges of violence in Iraq, random bombs going off in public places killing innocent civilians and leaving most Iraqi citizens baffled, it’s hard to imagine that the chaos will ever be quelled.

What would happen if U.S. troops came home now? Would these random bombings continue and tensions between factions of Islam grow stronger? Or does the Iraqi government have the organizational structure and infrastructure in place to handle the chaos on their own. And whose responsibility is this mess. As Colin Powell supposedly told Bush before the war, “If you break it, it’s yours.”

Fact of the matter is this, it’s nearly impossible to contain terrorists. The following is an excerpt from an article in today’s New York Times titled, “In Iraq, Carnage, Anger and Grief:”

“But how can we stop these attacks?” asked a woman who identified herself as Um Karim, a passenger in a bus that had just turned out of the terminal onto a main street when the third bomb exploded. “We have a saying in Arabic: ‘It’s hard to catch the thief if he is a member of the family.’ That’s our predicament.”

So now I’m torn. I never supported this war, but I wonder how responsible it would be to just pull out and see what happens. It may be the responsible thing to do because maybe the violence will subside and chaos slowly turn to order, but we really have no way of knowing; just like we had no way of knowing what would actually happen if we invaded Iraq: one of many reasons we shouldn’t have done it in the first place. (Sorry for beating a dead horse.)

What we really need now is some substantial truth-telling. What are our chances for success in Iraq? And at what cost? We must carefully weigh these things out and demand from our president and his administration that he tell us the truth about what’s happening there and where we might actually be ten years from now.

It’s increasingly hard for members of the American public to trust their president and support what’s happening there because Bush has not been especially good at telling the truth about why we’re there… I say we ought to spend just as much time harping about whether we ought to stay or go as we should be about getting our president to tell the truth.