The New York Times has quite an interesting article up about the latest crisis caused by Venezuela President Hugo Chavez. The Times argues that Chavez considers the democratically elected government of Colombia to be, basically, a proxy of the United States. Chavez even went so far as to call Colombia the “Israel of Latin America” recently.

President Bush fiercely defended Colombia, which receives $600 million a year in American aid to fight the leftist rebels and drug trafficking. He used the diplomatic crisis to push Congress to approve a Colombia trade deal that has languished for more than a year because of concerns among senior Democrats over human rights abuses there.

Mr. Bush, who telephoned Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, on Tuesday morning, told reporters at the White House, “I told the president that America fully supports Colombia’s democracy, and that we firmly oppose any acts of aggression that could destabilize the region.”

Employing a new strategy to portray the trade agreement with Colombia as an issue of national security, Mr. Bush used the occasion to call on Congress to ratify the deal as a way of countering leaders like Mr. Chávez who had emerged as scourges of American policies in the region.

Bush is stepping up his defense of his main ally, while Chavez is attacking Colombia for, basically, being just that; a US ally. It’s President Uribe isn’t impressed by Chavez, considering him basically a terrorist funder and socialist (which Chavez is of course), and isn’t quite willing to give in to the threat of violence.

While Chavez accuses Colombia of being a US proxy, Colombia accuses Chavez - and thus Venezuela - of giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the terrorist organization the FARC. On top of that, Colombia has found evidence that the FARC is working on a dirty bomb.

What set all of this off is that Colombian forces entered Ecuador; they were targeting FARC forces. They killed many FARC terrorists and seized computers. The military action proved that Ecuador was - and probably still is - harboring and aiding terrorists.  Ecuador, of course, doesn’t want the entire world to know this, and especially not Colombia so it started to threaten Colombia with military action.

The US instantly came to Colombia’s defense and so we are where we are now: on the brink of war.