Superblogger Matt Yglesias thinks that we should start calling a spade a spade in terms of U.S. military training for Georgia - why bother pretending like it is for operations in Afghanistan?  That first point is well taken (clearly the training has more to do with the fact that they were steamrolled by invading tanks about a year ago), but where they go from there is a bit nutty (like comparing Georgia and Mexico, and other classic U.S. liberal pitfalls and faulty thinking on Russia).Isaac Chotiner at TNR has already posted a sharp response to this one, but I think we can already point to how Washington is dealing with Russia's burgeoning military relationship with Venezuela - which despite the growing proof that Caracas is leaking these Russian weapons to FARC, the yanks are still relaxed, sober, ...

Venezuela's inimitable Hugo Chavez has been having quite the busy summer.  In between renewed crackdowns on the media, utterly totalitarian measures to usurp power from the democratically elected opposition, along with new evidence pointing to his support of FARC and narco-trafficking compliance, the Venezuelan president has also found time to denounce new conspiracy plots from the evil empire in Washington to invade Venezuela and topple his Bolivarian revolution.The main evidence he cites is a new agreement between Colombia and the United States on a military base ... which by the way does not mean there is an increase in U.S. personnel.  Caracas Chronicles, one of the best blogs on Venezuela in English, has a very good post on the topic, pointing out something very similar we see in Russia - what my friend David Satter has described as ...

José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, has published an opinion article in today's Washington Post criticizing the human rights abuses of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.  Although I am certainly influenced by the fact that I represent political prisoners in both Russia and Venezuela, I can't help but read Vivanco's piece and see some strong comparative parallels between the processes, trends, and methodologies used by both Vladimir Putin and his Latin American counterpart with respect to managing their human rights and democratic shortcomings. 

The growing convergence of the Russia-Venezuela relationship is one that should be obvious just from the newspaper headlines.  No sooner had Chávez made his relatively small nation of 26 million citizens the #1 buyer

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