Update on Iran in Latin America

The Guardian enjoyed the same irony I did regarding the past "relationship" between the Sandinistas and the Islamic Republic, but they note that Iran really got involved in Latin America by way of Chavez.

Venezuela's radical left-wing president, Hugo Chávez, opened Latin America to Iran by signing multiple accords with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including bilateral deals on oil, tractors and bicycles.

"The Chávez-Ahmadinejad relationship is what drives Iran's role in Latin America, which is fundamentally geopolitical rather than economic," said Michael Shifter, of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue thinktank.

Mr Chávez has billed the accords as an "axis of unity" against the US, which he terms the "empire", and has encouraged allies such as Mr Ortega to follow suit.

So, basically, all the America-haters are ganging up on America, despite their ideological differences. And so I go back to Zizek, from April 2003.

What I'm really afraid of is that when we left-wingers ask, "is America aware that in this way they are only creating new tensions?" they miss the point. What if the aim is to introduce instability to the entire region and then to brutally impose some kind of universalized emergency state or new order? But even if the U.S. is consciously counting on the global disorder, it will not be able to control it. My only hope is that American interventions will give rise to some kind of resistance. My big hope - as an atheist, praying night and day for it - is that the resistance in the Middle East will not be simply kidnapped by the so-called fundamentalists. That this resistance will have at least secular socialist wing. And I think there is a fair chance at it. Look at Iran. There is hope.

OK, so much for the hope for Iran. But he's only wrong about Iran because he's right about everything else. Unfortunately, the universalized emergency state starts at home . . .

tags technorati : Politics, Iran, Nicaragua, Zizek, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Ortega

Blowback Chronicles: The Tehran-Managua Axis

According to the model (Rome/Berlin/Tokyo), you need three members for a proper axis (aka, "axis of evil"), despite the fact that an axis typically is a single line between two points. Two members should be the primary partners, and at least one should be in East Asia. With Iraq now safely a Western-style democracy, Iran and North Korea have been interviewing potential new partners. It looks like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after considering such contenders as, well, most of the world, has finally settled on Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua.

The relationship between Iran and Nicaragua goes back to the 1980s, when Ortega was a former scrappy revolutionary fighting a US-backed right-wing counter-revolution, and Ahmadinejad was a soldier-engineer-student fighting a US-backed invasion by Iraq's then-dictator, Saddam ("The Hammer") Hussein. US President Ronald Reagan, famous for thinking out of the box before thinking out of the box was cool, funded the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary freedom fighters known as the "Contras" by selling weapons to Iran (via Israel) for the war against Iraq that he was also supporting. A case study in success now referred to in NSA circles as the "Moebius Gambit," but more widely known as the "Iran-Contra Affair," Reagan's operation projected Oliver North and John Poindexter to fame and fortune, first in congressional hearings, and later on FoxNewsChannel, the History Channel, and in the US government's Total Information Awareness program.

Iran and Nicaragua have engaged in a barter trade deal, while Iran and North Korea support each other's nuclear ambitions. Adding Nicaragua to the partnership opens axis access to the volatile anti-US Latin American region, including particularly Venezuela's populist former-commando Hugo Chavez and Cuba's long-time post-revolutionary dictator, Fidel Castro.

Axis of Evil (NDAQ: EVIL) shares rose on the news.

tags technorati : Axis of Evil, Iran, Nicaragua, Ortega, Ahmadinejad, North Korea

 

Dictators without Borders

Well, poor old neoliberal dictator Alberto Fujimori lost his bid for parliament in Japan, but he remains under house arrest in Chile (ahem). He has to stay there in order to be safe from extradition for human rights violations committed as president of Peru. Ironic, it seems to me, not only that he is hiding out in Chile, of all places, but that the last "terrorists" to give him any real trouble in Peru were not the famous lunatics, Shining Path, but the pseudo-indigenous (Inca) Tupac Amaru (when they took over the, um, Japanese embassy in 1996).

On a side note, the Economist mounts an interesting defense of international courts, noting:

It is easy to pooh-pooh international courts. After the creation of the world's first international war-crimes tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of the second world war, it took nearly half a century before another one was established—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up by the UN in The Hague in 1993. But since then, progress has been impressive. Of the 161 people the ICTY has indicted, only four are still on the run; 59 have been convicted.

tags technorati : Alberto Fujimori Peru Japan