On Killing Chavez

Do Pat Robertson and I actually agree on something? Not yet. Hugo Chavez is clearly a thug, an anachronism, a supporter of terrorists (principally, in Colombia), and a first-class S.O.B. This fall, Gordon Cucullu will publish a book alleging that Chavez is retailing North Korean heroin. That said, I see a vast gulf between how our government should deal with elected leaders and unelected ones. If there is a sanctifying event at which a government becomes legitimate, it’s called “election.” The troubling fact for those of us who don’t like Chavez is that he won a free election, and his term is not yet up. His theft of an extraconstitutional mid-term referendum doesn’t make the case for his illegitimacy yet, at least not to me.

I will likely be hated for saying this, but by elevating democracy to our highest principle in judging the rule of other governments–and it was right that we did–we incur an obligation to respect freely elected governments we don’t like. That does not mean, of course, that we can’t respond in the unlikely event that a freely elected government commits an act of war against us. It doesn’t mean that the United States can’t exert economic and diplomatic pressure on Chavez to comply with his legal obligations to leave in peace with his neighbors, abstain from crime, and cease his repression of the opposition in the meantime. It doesn’t mean that we have to respect Chavez the man, the myth, the caudillo. But I do think it obliges us to respect his legitimacy as a head of state until he remains in power after the expiration of his term, and without having been freely reelected to the position of power he then holds.

Then, kill him.