Israeli move to stop flotilla explodes into shooting and damaging rhetoric

It looks like Israel has a lot to answer for after its commandos killed at least nine activists trying to outmaneuver the county's blockade of the Gaza Strip territory controlled by Hamas. The commandos staged a predawn raid to try to stop the six-ship flotilla of 700 activists after it refused orders to stop. The flotilla was bringing thousands of tons of supplies to Gaza's isolated Palestinian population, but violence broke out before the boats could be secured and brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod to be searched, according to the Reuters international news service. European countries that had been steadily warming to Israel for two decades were quick with condemnations including, as expected, the usually hostile General Assembly of the United Nations. Turkey, the Muslim country that has been trying to join the European Union for years and has recently been facilitating negotiations between Israel and Syria, also joined the anti-Israel chorus. But Israel rightly contends that it had a right to enforce its blockade, which was imposed to prevent material that could be used to make weapons from reaching Gaza. Militants have fired thousands of missiles from the territory into southern Israeli cities. Egypt has cooperated with Israel in officially sealing the territory, but there have been reports of massive amounts of smuggling through tunnels under the border between Egypt and Gaza. But Israel is being sadly unrealistic if it ignores the magnitude of its miscalculation. That the commando raid went awry is not entirely Israel's fault, since the supposedly peaceful activists had obviously expected something to happen and came armed with, at least, crude weapons. But Israel did send paratroopers to seize control of the flotilla instead of using navy vessels to force the activists into Ashdod so the cargo could be searched. Israel will investigate the conduct of its soldiers and, hopefully, figure out what went wrong. But Israel will be forced to do it alone, since the rhetoric coming from the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states shows they are less interested in preventing violence than in scoring propaganda points against the Jewish state. Turkey called Israel's actions "terrorism," a comment so illogical it precludes any reasonable response. The Palestinian Authority called the attack on the flotilla "a massacre," which it obviously wasn't. Israel certainly did not expect its commando raid to go so terribly wrong. U.S. President Barack Obama got it exactly right when he said he regretted the loss of life and demanded a full accounting of what transpired at sea.

"Captain" Hugo aims rhetorical phasers at Barack Obama

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez criticized U.S. President Barack Obama as "lost in the Andromeda Nebula" on Sunday after Obama said the United States had been asked to do more to restore the president of Honduras, who was ousted in a coup last month. "We are not asking you to intervene in Honduras, Obama," Chavez said on his weekly television show, according to the Reuters international news service. "On the contrary, we are asking that 'the empire' gets its hands off Honduras and get its claws out of Latin America." The Venezuelan leader has been highly critical of United States' involvement with Latin American countries and repeatedly accuses Washington of trying to dominate the region. He claims the United States had advance knowledge of the Honduras coup in June and had arrangements in place to fly deposed President Manuel Zelaya out of the country from a U.S. military base. Obama has denied the charges, which does not necessarily mean they're untrue. But Chavez, for his part, is no stranger to bombastic rhetoric. He frequently launches into tirades against what he called U.S. imperialism and, remember, he's the guy who called former President George W. Bush "the devil" at the United Nations in 2006. Chavez is known to be angry about an agreement between the United States and his neighbor, Colombia, that grants access to military bases for U.S. troops to help in the fight against the drug trade, Reuters said. Chavez claims the agreement makes it easier for the United States to attack Venezuela to steal its oil reserves, and is actively purchasing Russian armaments to beef up his armed forces. "This is just the start of an imperial military expansion," Chavez said. The Venezuelan president called on the United States to withdraw from its longtime base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and from the Soto Cano airbase in Honduras.

Nothing comes easy in post-Bush era foreign policy

News that socialist Rafael Correa easily won re-election as president of Ecuador on Sunday should give pause to the inner circle around U.S. President Barack Obama, since it means they will have to work harder to contain damage from the Bush administration. No doubt, the White House had hoped that Correa, a pal of anti-U.S. rhetoric spouting Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, would at least suffer a setback in this election that would slow him down. Instead, Correa got a majority of the vote in the eight-candidate field, avoiding a runoff for the first time since democracy was restored in Ecuador in 1979, according to the Reuters international news service. The leftist Correa, popular in Ecuador for socialist policies that took hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign countries drilling for offshore oil or managing banana plantations and putting the money into pensions, schools and health care, money to the poor, successfully pushed a constitutional amendment enabling him to run for a third term in 2013. "This revolution is on the march, and nobody and nothing can stop us," the 46-year-old president said in Guayaquil, his hometown. "The people ... have given us the most splendorous victory of probably the last 50 years." Correa's major rivals included former president Lucio Gutierrez and billionaire Alvaro Noboa. Correa caused a stir in the West last year by defaulting on billions of dollars in debt, closing a U.S. airbase used for anti-drug flights and expelling two U.S. diplomats he accused of spying.