When does a Coup become a Coup?

Currently all the news are focused on what's going on in the Middle East so the recent short lived coup in Venezuela has quickly disappeared from the news. In particular, the news have not really picked up on how and when the US government reacted to what was going on there. To recap, recently there have been strikes against the government in Venezuela and its president Chavez (who is not loved by the US government due to his leftist leanings and friendly overtures towards Cuba, Iraq and other bad boys). Venezuela is the third largest oil supplier to the US and the strikes stopped oil production and drove up oil prices (it didn't help the Sadam Hussein is threatening to stop oil production in protest to the Israel/Palestine conflict just around the same time). On Friday, 4/12/02 there was a military coup against president Chavez, the flash point being the bloody reaction of Chavez's supporters against a massive but peaceful protest. The military announced that Chavez had resigned and introduced and interim government.

As far as the U.S. Department of State was concerned "events in Venezuela resulted in a transitional government until new elections [could] be held". All Latin American countries and most of the rest of the world quickly denounced the coup in Venezuela. Both the State Department and the White House said that "the Chavez government provoked this crisis" and this was just a "change in government".

I guess one person's coup is another person's "change of government" kind of like one person's terrorist is another person's "freedom fighter".

When the Venezuelan military decided that they didn't like the new government any better than the old one and reinstated Chavez, who, as it turned out, had not resigned after all (despite of what Ari Fleischer said) - the spokesman back paddled, saying that "United States officials explicitly made clear repeatedly to opposition leaders that the United States would not support a coup".

The press briefings actually make a fascinating read. It's almost better than West Wing (in a scarry sort of way).