Review by Linda Robinson
Sunday, February 22, 2009

THE THREAT CLOSER TO HOME

Hugo Chávez And the War Against America

By Douglas Schoen and Michael Rowan

Free Press. 220 pp. $25

Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez would be getting a lot more ink in U.S. newspapers if the United States weren't focused on fighting two wars. For more than a decade, Chávez has patterned his regime on Fidel Castro's Cuba. He has nationalized the stakes of U.S. businesses, asserted control over Venezuela's principal cash cow (the state-owned but once independently operated oil company PDVSA), shut down media outlets and prevented opposition party members from taking elected office. After being rebuffed in 2007 in a bid to become president-for-life, he held a second referendum last Sunday that cleared the way for him to run for reelection without term limits.

Since Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, the authors of this book believe that Americans ought to take Chávez more seriously. They are far from impartial observers. Both Douglas Schoen and Michael Rowan are political consultants who worked for the opposition candidate whom Chávez defeated in 2006. They believe that Chávez manipulated that vote, just as they contend that he rigged the results of a 2004 recall effort mounted by the civic opposition movement Súmate ("Join up"), for which the authors also worked. Schoen, who played a key role in former President Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996, is a prominent practitioner of the global art of political polling and consulting: He has had 19 heads of state as clients and helped run election campaigns for Silvio Berlusconi, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. Rowan has done much the same thing, mostly for Latin American candidates.

During a decade of reporting in Latin America, I watched as Chávez behaved in undemocratic ways at home and supported subversive movements in the hemisphere. But Schoen and Rowan undermine their argument with hyperbole and unsupported allegations. On the first page of "The Threat Closer to Home," they write that "Chávez arguably presents a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden does on a day-to-day basis," but they make no case that Venezuelaintends to attack the United States or help others to do so. They repeat a litany of previously published allegations about Chávez's support for Hezbollah and his close relationship with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But they do not add anything to the factual record, nor do they attempt a coherent explanation of what the two radical leaders are up to. The authors allege that Hezbollah operates "at least five training camps in Venezuela," but they offer no evidence for this. There is not even a footnote to buttress that sentence or the following one: "Hamas and even al-Qaeda have sent members to Venezuela to avail themselves of Chávez's hospitality."

Venezuela and Iran definitely can affect U.S. interests, but it is important to be clear about the nature of the threat, as far as it is currently known. The real power plays by the two leaders are in their respective neighborhoods; that is where the true dangers lie. Chávez has backed Colombia's FARC guerrillas and helped bring fellow radical populists to power in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Venezuela outspends the United States in economic aid to Latin America by 9 to 1. To push back against criticism of his agenda in Latin America, Chávez has marshaled powerful U.S. lobbyists and a phalanx of Hollywood celebrities (Naomi Campbell, Danny Glover, Sean Penn) who are drawn to reprise the 1960s radical-chic pose. Through Venezuela's state-owned Citgo Petroleum, Chávez even bankrolled heating-oil rebates for low-income Americans.

In a final chapter on how the United States should deal with Chávez, the authors appear to recognize that, despite their heavy breathing about international terrorist threats, the real problem is Latin America's vulnerability to demagogues who preach easy solutions and offer scapegoats for the region's economic and social problems. The remedy is for Washington to develop a Latin America policy that makes sense. Promoting good governance, working to eliminate poverty and seeking to reduce the hugely unequal distribution of income in the region would put the United States on the right side of the argument. Ultimately, the way to defeat Chávez is to outcompete him by offering better ideas and better policies.

Linda Robinson covered Latin America for U.S. News & World Report and is the author, most recently, of "Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq."