The stances and the policies of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have left unanswered questions and divisions at the domestic level in his country, and at the regional level in Latin America, between those who supported him and those who criticized him. Yet his policies and his alliances in the Middle East revealed excessive naivety that made him mix up fat and thin, and be fooled by the slogans some regimes skillfully make use of to cover up the truth about them. Indeed, “El Comandante", as he liked to call himself in reference to his role model Che Guevara, was an ally and supporter of Arab tyrants, some of whom were toppled by their people, such as Muammar Gaddafi, while others are still in the process, with their people trying to topple them, such as Bashar Al-Assad. Yet his strongest relationship was with Iran, with which he shared enmity towards the “Great Satan", despite the fact that the Venezuelan strongman continued to sell most of his oil to the Americans. Of course, Chavez had focused his interest on working in Latin America, especially in terms of saving dying regimes, such as that of the Castro family in Cuba, which he freely supplied with oil and funds. Yet he also forged relations of cooperation with Russia and China, as well as with anyone who would enter into “enmity" or competition with the United States across the globe. Chavez described the Libyan Colonel as a martyr after he was killed, and considered his fall and his death to represent a great loss for Libya and for the “revolutionary" world he dreamt of establishing, as the two of them had a great deal in common. Indeed, they were both military officers and had risen to power after a coup; they both considered themselves to be “friends of the poor" and had adopted the principle of “redistribution of wealth"; and they both loved slogans and long speeches, as well as provocative and controversial media appearances. Yet Chavez was more sincere than Gaddafi, with it having become clear that the former had in effect been redistributing the wealth of his country which he was robbing to his own children, and that his enmity towards “imperialism" had been merely a verbal one, while he yearned to embrace it, as he did in the final years of his rule. As for Iran, which found in Chavez's rule its long-sought opportunity to infiltrate regions traditionally under the influence of the United States, it has made use of its strong relationship with him in order to engage in what Washington claims to be terrorist attacks carried out by Iranian agents, among them some Lebanese from Hezbollah and some Syrians. And it is no surprise for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to add him after his death to the host of the “Awaited Mahdi" and foretell his return in the end of days. The ruling regime in Damascus, for its part, praised the departed's “honorable stance towards the conspiracy against Syria" and his solidarity with the country “in the face of the heinous imperialistic campaign hatched against it" – the phrase most favored by Assad's media apparatus to describe the uprising of the Syrian people – especially as Chavez had supplied the regime with oil after the international embargo imposed on it. He had also described Assad as “a Socialist President with a great feeling of humanity" and considered the Americans to be pulling the strings of a conspiracy against him, knowing that Syria's rebels complain that the US is neglecting the situation in their country. Yet the real orphan here is Cuba, which the next President of Venezuela, even if he was chosen by Chavez to be his successor, might not be able to continue supporting unconditionally. Indeed, the late Venezuelan President may, due to his strong personality which dominated his government, his zealous discourse and his ability to stir the emotions of his supporters, have been able to take liberties with the use of his country's wealth as if it had been his own personal treasury, distributing from it whatever he wished to whomever he wished. His successor, on the other hand, will most likely be forced to adopt more rational policies and present more accurate accounts.
