Hugo Chavez has decided on who he wants to be when he grows up: Saddam Hussein. He’s getting his military flex on and going for a land grab.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to join the rebels in a war to overthrow hard-line Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a key ally of the United States, deploying tanks, fighter jets and thousands of troops along the Colombian border.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa also ordered troops to the border, expelled Colombia’s ambassador and recalled its ambassador to Bogota, but left its embassy open. Venezuela closed its embassy in Colombia and ordered all diplomats home.

A weekend battle sparked the mobilization, in which Colombian forces killed a top leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in a camp in Ecuador

Seizing on a Colombian bombing of a remote terrorist target in Venezuelan ally Ecuador as his cause, Hugo has cranked a rumored ten tank battalions to the border with Colombia and seriously racheted up the bellicose blue language. Clearly he banks on the United States and other world powers being distracted elsewhere - like, for instance, the original Saddam Hussein’s country, Iraq. The question on many an American mind in-the-know then becomes, “Why the dickens is he pulling this?”

Legitimate grievance has little to do with it. Chavez ideologically sides with the FARC Marxists that the Colombian’s zapped in Ecuador, but he has no actual ties and stands to gain nothing through throwing in his lot with those scroungy rebels. If the FARC could have pulled off a big win for The People’s Cause, they would have done it by now in the 34 years of civil war Colombia’s been enduring. Furthermore, Chavez is no longer threatened by the actual right-wing terrorists creeping around Colombia and Venezuela’s jungles, the drug-fueled and ruthless AUC, as AUC demobilized two years ago. He might’ve had a gripe then, but the only right-wing guns clustered near his border in Colombia are part of the mammoth military aid package the USA provides the Colombian government in its bottomless “War on Drogas.”

That brings us to the real reason Hugo is threatening to hop the border: Shaming the superpower.

First off, it’s a little known fact above the Rio Grande that Venezuela has been locked in a land dispute with Colombia for ages. There’s always a land dispute behind these inexplicable border gripes that flare up over easily resolvable incidents like Colombia’s bombing of anti-Colombian thugs in Ecuador. In this case, it’s the land Colombia holds encircling the Gulf of Venezuela. That’s the object of the aggression in real terms in this case, no doubt. After all, Hugo would only get a UN-sized headache if he tried to seize all of Colombia, but snagging back a stretch of seashore with his country’s name on it, well, he might just pull that off.

But what he gains by either an assault or just the threat thereof is the credibility to say he stared down a US ally and made Uncle Sam blink. It’s no coincidence that he’s already compared Colombia to another country that could very well be considered a US Forward Operating Base - Israel. The analogy is only so apt. Colombia is different from its neighbors only insofar as it gets mad amounts of US aid. It is hardly the constant ethnic flashpoint and human rights nightmare that Israel is. Still, Hugo is going to take any excuse he can get to seem like he’s butting heads with a superpower.

As Hugo himself puts it:

“We don’t want war, but we aren’t going to permit the U.S. empire, which is the master [of Colombia] … to come divide us,” Chavez said on his weekly TV and radio program.

All clear on who he thinks he’s fighting? Good. Because the “who” is the reason “why” Chavez might decide to finally snatch that tasty hunk of gulf land during this nail-biting election year, like the barbarian chiefs of old did whenever the Romans went for each others’ throats. It has less to do about rocks on the shore of his namesake gulf, and more about reputation.

Hugo has decided to be the rogue nation leader who either throws mud in our eye by claiming we backed down on this border dispute, or the full-blown Saddam, hopping the border for a land grab to fill up his coffers and put laurels on his brow. If he does decide the latter, he’s as dumb as he looks. For as much as people regionally make take heed of his saber-rattling, the whole world knows what we did to Saddam Hussein.