http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GG08Ak01.html
Jul 8, 2005
Left, right: Iran and Venezuela in lockstep
By M K Bhadrakumar
Among the world leaders felicitating Iran's president-elect, Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, one head of state conspicuously set aside protocol norms -
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Though Ahmadinejad will only be formally
sworn in on August 4 - and a congratulatory message through diplomatic channels
at this stage was all that was required - Chavez telephoned Ahmadinejad.
Chavez was being deliberate in making an extraordinary gesture of warmth and
camaraderie. He wished to personally convey to Ahmadinejad that the latter's
election had enhanced the "legitimacy" of Iran internationally, a country that
Venezuela would regard as a "friend and brotherly nation" on the world stage.
He said he would depute a high-level delegation from Caracas to visit Tehran
specially to be present at Ahmadinejad's swearing-in ceremony, and that he
would visit Tehran in the near future, aiming at a "comprehensive expansion" of
cooperation between the two countries.
By the conventional labeling of dogmas and ideology, with Ahmadinejad's
election, Iran is supposed to have taken a turn to the "right", turning its
back on "reform-minded" forces - only to be empathized by one of the few
genuinely "leftist" statesmen remaining on the world stage. Nothing would
appear more incongruous.
But Chavez knew he was doing the right thing at the right time. In a way, he
was carrying forward the impulses of the recent summit meeting of Arab
countries and the countries of the Latin hemisphere, an extraordinary event in
itself, hosted by Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, another
prominent figure in "progressive" Latin politics. (Asia is yet to have a
comparable forum with the Middle East.) Chavez's gesture was full of political
symbolism, drawing attention to the close similarities in the aspirations of
countries like Iran and Venezuela in the world order.
There are interesting parallels between the Iranian and Venezuelan situations.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela quite fits into the political vocabulary of a bygone
era - in terms of the politics of "right" and "left". The fact remains, to
begin with, that the progressive politics that Chavez embodies do not pass the
test of militant secularism. Their roots lie in the Latin Catholic Church.
Where Che Guevara and a host of other leftist revolutionaries had failed, the
Latin Church kept the flame of "liberation" going till the advent of democracy
in the hemisphere. Like in Latin American countries, Iran, too, has had its
fair share of political movements based on Marxist and non-Marxist socialism.
Yet, in both contexts, the "pious poor" chose to follow the mosque or the
church. This does not make the revolutions in Iran or Venezuela any less
democratic.
Chavez made an important point. He chose to overlook the outward form of the
Iranian people's democratic way of life. He wouldn't be prescriptive that
countries like Iran (or India, for that matter, after almost six decades of
independence) should conform to Western-style democracy, or be critical that
the performance of their democratic institutions does not measure up. What
mattered to him was that these were defining moments in the 21st century world
order.
As a follower of Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century liberator of South America
from Spanish rule, Chavez is attracted to the platform on which Ahmadinejad has
been elected. We may dismiss both figures as "populists". There is indeed no
certainty that either of them will succeed. Indeed, the odds are stacked
against them in many ways. But what brings them together is that their
respective platforms, despite their apparent mutual ideological divergence, in
fact have a curious affinity.
Both leaders have pledged themselves to consummate a social revolution based on
a model of development that is at great variance with mainstream market
democracy. They are advocates of a "new socialism" aimed at responding in their
own way to the imperatives arising from their countries' acute underdevelopment
and social divisions. The programs of both reflect eclectic tendencies - both
are ardent nationalists on the one hand, while being "continentalists" at the
same time. Both have pledged to take recourse to selective state intervention
in the economy, while being tolerant of the private, independent business
sector ("bazaari" interests). In political terms, both emphasize their concern
for the welfare of the "pious poor"; and, both play on intense nationalism,
invoking patience and sacrifice for reconciling interest groups. Both intend to
mobilize the people by penetrating society through their respective variants of
"revolutionary" parties.
Lubricating relationships
Oil is the trump card for both Chavez and Ahmadinejad. Chavez is an unabashed
admirer of the slogan "oil belongs to the people" - a clarion call first
sounded by Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1951. Depletion of developed oil
fields; lack of investment in developing new ones; the criticality of oil
revenues for the national economy; diversion of oil revenues to social programs
and social empowerment; the political need of aggressive diversification of the
market for oil exports, away from the traditional dependence on the US; the
search for cooperative regional energy grids - in all these respects Venezuela
and Iran have similar orientations.
What binds Chavez and Ahmadinejad particularly close in the present-day world
is the American policy of "containment" toward them. For President George W
Bush, Iran belongs to the "axis of evil"; for Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, the Chavez regime is a "negative influence" on the entire Western
hemisphere. Both these "Bolivarists" - Chavez and Ahmadinejad - can be expected
to pose a grave challenge to American hegemony by offering an alternative model
to any US-driven market democracy in their regions. Their vision of a "new
socialist society" with primacy on eliminating poverty and subordinating
private (or transnational) business to broader social objectives puts them on a
collision course with the US. Their audacious counter-agenda to the dominant
tendency of "reforms" in developing countries (conformity with the demands of
globalization), becomes particularly disconcerting for Washington since it
comes at a time when the US's traditional hegemony in the two strategically
important regions - South America and Middle East - is becoming increasingly
shaky.
South America's transition from authoritarian rule to democracy is more or less
nearing completion. In the Middle East the stirrings of transition are just
beginning. But in South America, the democracies are already moving away from
the traditional US dominance of the Western hemisphere. Soon after taking
office in 2000, Bush announced a new era in US-Latin relations. The new era
began with Bush holding a summit meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox as
his first engagement with a foreign dignitary.
But South America has since refused to support the "war on terror" or the
invasion of Iraq; it has become lukewarm about entering into free-trade deals
with the US; the Organization of American States (OAS) rebuffed Washington
twice in recent months. The OAS turned down for the first time in over five
decades since its inception a US-backed candidate for the post of OAS secretary
general. And secondly, the OAS refused to endorse a US proposal at the OAS
general assembly meeting in Florida on June 7 that the "OAS has to have a valid
instrument to help the countries of America whose democracies are in peril" (as
Rice put it), and that it was not enough that governments were democratically
elected, they must also govern in a democratic manner. For Washington, the
"Chavez problem" or the "Cuban-Venezuelan axis" is becoming more and more an
"urgent necessity" (to quote US State Department officials) to deal with.
Meanwhile, the countries of South America are becoming votaries of a multipolar
world order.
What would happen if, once the genie of democracy got out of the bottle, the
Middle East, too, were to take to the path of the "Bolivarian" vision? The fact
remains that the confrontation between Iran and the US is also a test of their
relative influence in the region. For a variety of reasons, Iran's neighboring
countries in the Gulf and the Middle East (or Turkey for that matter) would not
play ball any more if the US were to raise the specter of a "threat perception"
emanating from the "theocracy" in Tehran. On the nuclear issue, none of the
Gulf countries has chosen to identify with the US campaign against Iran over
its nuclear development program. In comparison, in the early 1990s, the US
could easily raise dust in the region over Iran's routine arms purchases to
replace its depleted stocks.
The call that Chavez put through, across many thousand leagues and several time
zones, to Tehran was a stark reminder that the US's quarrel with Iran began 50
years ago with Mossadeq's rise to power in 1950, and the "Bolivarian" challenge
that he posed. For Washington, what a successful Iran means to the geopolitics
of the Gulf and the Middle East is a profound issue. After all, it took hardly
any time for South America, a region utterly used to Washington's bullying, to
start to rebel.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian career diplomat who has served in Islamabad,
Kabul, Tashkent and Moscow.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
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