President Bush is given a lot of credit for sticking to his guns over Iraq, but who's paying attention to Venezuela? Oil prices have taken their biggest jump in years, adding this most significant factor to the economies downturn, and Venequelan oil, or the lack thereof, is the most significant factor in the jump. So much for Bush's Latin American link so much ballyhoo'd in his first weeks in power. How many of us now remember the big deal made out of the fact that the first foreign country Bush turned to after his election was Mexico and not Canada as has been tradition for so many years.

Those of us thinking about regime change in Iraq, about the time needed to keep troops in the country to help establish a true democracy (something resembling American capitalism ala Germany and Japan) should think in terms of how long we kept troops in Europe and Asia. Ooops! did I use past tense? Don't we still have troops in Germany and Japan? Wasn't part of the equation that we provide the military might for those two countries so that their economies could focus on rebuilding? Didn't we even go so far as to pay those countries for the right to defend them? Lots of questions, and it isn't clear at all how the analogy is to be played out.