Nobody knows what Trotsky would say in 2007, though I rather doubt whether he'd be a booster for the dead-end exercise in neo-imperialism being run by Bush and Blair. Dustbins of history and all that. In any case, there's no point in treating the mighty dead theologically. Trotsky was wrong about some things, after all. But if you're looking to promote a Popular Front with 'progressive' imperialism against the 'backward' national bourgeoisies of nations like, say, Iran, and are interested in maintaining some intellectual credibility, it's probably not a good idea to invoke the most famous opponents of the Popular Front to help make your case. I'd try Joe Lieberman.

'Chavez forced through another Enabling Act in January of 2007 and plans to scrap executive term limits so he can fulfill his ambition of remaining in power until 2030. That would certainly make him, if not quite a dictator, then very much a de facto president-for-life.'

Only if he's re-elected every five years. Really, this is silly stuff. You might as well suggest FDR was a President for life. There's a reason why every group of international observers and the opposition accepted the result of last December's poll. If you want to find monstrous oppression in South America then you could do worse than shift your gaze westward to Colombia, where the Uribe has this week been shown to be complicit in the death squad killings of six hundred trade unionists and journalists over the past four years (that's six hundred more people than Chavez has killed: he's got a way to go to catch up with Uncle Joe and fulfil all the boilerplate rhetoric on right-wing blogs, hasn't he?)

There's also a reason why Chavez became a folk hero after leading the nationwide rising of 1992. That reason is called the Caracazo - it's also known as the Tianamen Square of South America. When a government massacres 5,000 of its own citizens it forsakes the right to rule. Just as there are just and unjust wars, so there are more and less justified military risings. The rising of 1992 belongs beside the Portugese rising of 1974, not the actions of Pinochet or the Pinochistas of 2002.

But let's hold the government of Iraq, and the PUK that support it, to the same standards as Chavez. If you think Chavez was wrong to attempt to get the state to oversee CTV elections in 2000, I can only imagine what fits of apoplexy you must be driven to by the treatment of Iraq's trade unions. Right? Or is the Baathist Labor Code, decree 8750, which freezes all union assets, the use of the army against striking oil workers over the past two weeks, and the arrest of trade unionists and cadre of the Worker-Communist Party by the PUK somehow permissible, in the same way that Lula's neo-liberal destruction of Brazil's pension plan and persecution of his erstwhile opponents in the Workers Party is acceptable? The decent left can be remarkably indecent at times.