The Unknown War

If a dictator rants and raves in a forest and nobody is there to listen to him, does he make a sound?

Venezuela could easily sell oil to markets other than the United States and is prepared to end exports to its No. 1 buyer if needed, the oil minister said in comments published Sunday.

President Hugo Chavez's government has recently stepped up threats to cut off oil exports to the United States and sell Venezuelan-owned refineries there amid rising tensions with President George W. Bush's Administration.

"If our country, our process, our constitution are attacked by the Bush Administration, we are not going to send any more oil," Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez told the Ultimas Noticias daily in an interview.

Chavez is suffering from delusions of relevance. Ditto the ASSociated Press, whose sighting of "rising tensions" between Chavez and the Bush White House must be from the same imaginary but wishful source as the "looming civil war" in Iraq. Or maybe it's just penis envy; I mean, my goodness, if I had posted a blurb on every rhetorical broadside that the Venezuelan dictator has hurled at Dubya, I'd have crashed the Blogger server months ago. Seems like there's at least one or two verbal vomitings a week. And never is there a response from Washington, unless you count bemused junior State Department spokespeople. And even they must be chortling over Minister Ramirez' really, really forced paranoia about "invasions" and "attacks" and insulting their national brand of picante sauce.

Or perhaps it's Ramirez' braggadocious claim of "easily" replacing us as buyer of over half their oil exports.

Uh-huh:

Industry experts have said Venezuela would find it difficult to find alternative markets for its oil because the country's heavy, highly sulfurous crude requires special refineries which are limited. Also, the U.S. market is only five days away by tanker, and exports elsewhere would be more costly.

Venezuela is only a tenth of our oil imports. Without us, their communizing economy would collapse like a Michael Moore lawnchair, and the Chavez regime along with it. Indeed, we wouldn't have to so much as literally lift a finger as the "attack" they insist is coming from America would be self-inflicted.

But it isn't all grins, smiles, giggles, & laughs. In concert with an Iranian attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz, a Venezuelan oil embargo could have an actual strategic context, even if it didn't have the impact that is the stuff of Chavista wet dreams.

And if the Iranians and/or ChiComms have snuck nukes to Howlin' Hugo and his mentor Fidel Castro, huffing & puffing about otherwise un-unloadable high-sulfur crude may be the least of our worries.