Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is training civilians either to defend their country against a predicted U.S. invasion or to form “a virtual private army at the service of the president, designed less to defend the nation than to tighten his domestic controls.” Which is it? There’s no way to know for sure, but a unilateralist U.S. foreign policy, accusations of U.S. involvement in the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, and the expressed Bush administration policy towards Chávez, certainly offer Chávez an excuse to do whichever it is he is doing.