My use of Trotsky in this piece was to counterpose his actual political philosophy with the warped and semi-literate interpretation of it by Chavez. Though I wouldn't deign to try and locate the Old Man on today's complicated spectrum, I doubt he'd agree with you that Iran constitutes a national bourgeois state. (Trotsky was at his most mordant in anatomizing and reprehending all forms of religious fundamentalism, from the Catholic Church's warm support for Franco to the smelly Eastern Orthodoxy of the Balkans and Russia.)

Your FDR analogy is also flawed given the U.S. amended its constitution to prevent such prolonged tenures of future administrations. Chavez alters Venezuela's for quite the opposite purpose, and you may choose to believe, if you like, that he'll go quietly if ousted by an election between now and 2030, but all indications point to 'not likely' on the Magic 8 Ball of third world prophecy. If he enjoys the kind of "folk heroism" you speak of -- Gramsci's term cretinismo eroico seems to me the apter one -- then why must he expand and pack a Supreme Court with loyalists to ensure zero resistance to his social and economic policies? And why the recurrent Enabling Acts, if the country and its legislative representatives are so firmly behind chavismo?

"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."

Well, if I were looking for monstrous oppression in South America, I'd need well over 2,000 words to report my findings, wouldn't I? But this piece was about poseur Marxists.

Your defense of justified military uprisings suffers from wishful historical revisionism. Chavez and his coupists were not needed to overthrow and imprison Perez, as the Venezuelan National Assembly did just that via parliamentary and constitutional means. Moreover, do you recall who (reluctantly) became the head of state, overseeing six provisional governments, after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal? Antonio de Spinola is hardly an ideal generalissmo for any self-respecting Bolivarian revolutionary to want to be identified with, so you do your crimson doyen small favor there, as well.

As for the Baathist labor law, this was carried over by Paul Bremer during his disastrous administration of the Coalition Provisional Authority. It was the only feature of the deposed dictatorship he found worth preserving, reasons for which should be self-evident to anyone familiar with his corporatist background and Kissingerian interests. One needn't support his proconsular follies to support the current Iraqi government, or at least its ablest members. If the law is changed, it will be done so by more than one man.

Trade unionists and the Communist Party are still consistently the moral seconds on the American and British-led reconstituion of Iraq, even while rightly criticizing the execution of stupid and immoral policies.

The Workers-Communist Party has, in the past, supported the PUK as the governing party of the KRG, such as it did, for instance, in demanding the arrest of Ansar al-Islam leader Mullah Krekar for his terrorist attacks against PUK officials in Suleimaniyah. It saw some merit in the former Kurdish leadership, however equivocal that merit might have been. Though, while we're on the subject of total opposition, the WCP is openly against Iraq's Oil Law and is affiliated with the Iraq Freedom Congress, which now boasts its own satellite television channel -- Sana TV -- devoted to the cause of civil resistance against religious sectarianism, the Maliki regime, and the U.S. military presence and "occupation." CTV might consider renting air time.

It's also unavoidable to note that Iraq, unlike Venezuela, is in a state of bloody civil war and its chief resource is being daily plundered and attacked by jihadist and Baathist and lumpen elements. If you defend Chavez's self-imposed "state of emergency" measures in peacetime, why so coy about their democratically decided counterparts in Mesopotamia? Should the army not do what it can to prevent the entire petrol-economy from grinding to a halt, the effects of which would be devastating for all political parties and the whole of Iraqi society?

The General Federation of Iraqi Workers, which you might also call "labor aristocracy," manages to protest both the army's heavy-handed actions against trade unionists, and support the cause of pluralist democracy, without hestitation.