Natural alliance: leftists and Muslim terrorists. Bruce
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GG08Ak01.html 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. -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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