In perhaps his boldest foreign policy move during his presidency, Barack Obama Wednesday announced that he intends to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba.
While the president noted that he lacked the authority to lift the 54-year-old trade embargo against Havana, he issued directives that will permit more American citizens to travel there and third-country subsidiaries of US companies to engage in commerce. Other measures include the launching a review of whether Havana should remain on the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” The president also said he looked forward to engaging Congress in “an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.”
“In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” said Obama in a nationally televised announcement.
“Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.”
The announcement, which was preceded by a secret, 45-minute telephone conversation Tuesday morning between Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, drew both praise from those who have long argued that Washington’s pursuit of Cuba’s isolation has been a total failure and bitter denunciations from right-wing Republicans. Some of them vowed, among other things, to oppose any effort to lift the embargo, open the US embassy in Havana, or confirm a US ambassador to serve there. (Washington has had an Interest Section in the Cuban capital since 1977.)
“Today’s announcement initiating a dramatic change in US policy is just the latest in a long line of failed attempts by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all costs,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of a number of fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American lawmakers and a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
“I intend to use my role as incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee to make every effort to block this dangerous and desperate attempt by the President to burnish his legacy at the Cuba people’s expense,” he said in a statement. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office.”
The outgoing Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, also decried Obama’s announcement. “The United States has just thrown the Cuban regime an economic lifeline,” he said.
“With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, Cuba is losing its main benefactor, but will now receive the support of the United States, the greatest democracy in the world,” said Menendez, who is also Cuban-American.
But other lawmakers hailed the announcement.
Today President Obama and President Raul Castro made history,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat and one of three lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who escorted Alan Gross, a US Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, from Havana Wednesday morning as part of a larger prisoner and spy swap that precipitated the announcement.
“Those who cling to a failed policy (and) …may oppose the President’s actions have nothing to offer but more of the same. That would serve neither the interests of the United States and its people, nor of the Cuban people,” Leahy said. “It is time for a change.”
Other analysts also lauded Obama’s Wednesday’s developments, comparing them to historic breakthroughs with major foreign policy consequences.
“Obama has chosen to change the entire framework of the relationship, as (former President Richard) Nixon did when he travelled to China,” said William LeoGrande, a veteran Cuba scholar at American University, in an email from Havana. “Many issues remain to be resolved, but the new direction of US policy is clear.”
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based hemispheric think tank that has long urged Washington to normalize ties with Havana, told IPS the regional implications would likely be very positive.
“Obama’s decision will be cheered and applauded throughout Latin America,” he said.
“The Cuba issue has sharply divided Washington from the rest of the hemisphere for decades, and this move, long overdue, goes a long way towards removing a key major source of irritation in US-Latin American relations,” Shifter said.
Obama also announced Wednesday that he will attend the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Castro had also been officially invited, over the objections of both the US and Canada, at the last Summit in Cartagena in 2012, so there had been some speculation that Obama might boycott the proceedings.
Harvard international relations expert Stephen Walt said he hoped that Wednesday’s announcement portends additional bold moves by Obama on the world stage in his last two years as president despite the control of both houses of Congress by Republicans.
“One may hope that this decision will be followed by renewed efforts to restore full diplomatic relations with even more important countries, most notably Iran,” he told IPS in an email.
“Recognition does not imply endorsing a foreign government’s policies; it simply acknowledges that U.S. interests are almost always well served by regular contact with allies and adversaries alike,” he said.
Administration officials told reporters that Wednesday’s developments were made possible by 18 months of secret talks between senior official from both sides—not unlike those carried out in Oman between the US and Iran prior to their landmark November 2013 agreement with five other world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Officials credited Pope Francis, an Argentine, with a key role in prodding both parties toward an accord.
“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision taken by the Governments of the United States of America and Cuba to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history,” the Vatican said in a statement Wednesday.
The Vatican’s strong endorsement could mute some of the Republican and Cuban-American criticism of normalization and make it more difficult for Rubio and his colleagues to prevent the establishment of an embassy and appointment of an ambassador, according to some Capitol Hill staff.
Similarly, major US corporations, some of whom, particularly in the agribusiness and consumer goods sectors, have seen major market potential in Cuba, are likely to lobby their allies on the Republican side.
“We deeply believe that an open dialogue and commercial exchange between the US and Cuban private sectors will bring shared benefits, and the steps announced today will go a long way in allowing opportunities for free enterprise to flourish,” said Thomas Donohue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in a statement. Donohue headed what he called an unprecedented “exploratory” trip to Cuba earlier this year.
“Congress now has a decision to make,” said Jake Colvin, the vice president for global trade issues at the National Foreign Trade Council, an association of many of the world’s biggest multi-national corporations. “It can either show that politics stops at the water’s edge, or insist that the walls of the Cold War still exist.”
Wednesday’s announcement came in the wake of an extraordinary series of editorials by the New York Times through this autumn in favour of normalization and the lifting of the trade embargo.
In another sign of a fundamental shift here, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill took some steps to ease the embargo during his tenure as president, disclosed in her book published last summer that she had urged Obama to “take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”
That stance, of course, could alienate some Cuban-American opinion, especially in the critical “swing state” of Florida if Clinton runs in the 2016 election. But recent polls of Cuban-Americans have suggested an important generational change in attitudes toward Cuba and normalization within the Cuban-American community, with the younger generation favoring broader ties with their homeland.
Photo: Alan Gross talks with President Obama onboard a government plane headed back to the US, Dec. 17, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
]]>The country that could ultimately suffer the most damage from a sustained depression in the world price of oil could be one that is not a major producer: Egypt.
Unable to sustain itself, Egypt is being propped up by big infusions of cash from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Those two oil states, closely aligned with the Cairo government headed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, could afford to be generous in their commitments when they were taking in $100 a barrel, just a few months ago.
With the price now down to about $60 and unlikely to rise much over the next year at least, it becomes an open question how long it will take for the two Gulf states’ domestic needs to overtake their support for Egypt.
The Saudis and the Emiratis understand that Egypt is an economic “bottomless pit,” according to Gregory Gause, a specialist in the Gulf monarchies at Texas A&M University. There have been no indications so far that they are contemplating a pullback from Egypt, but it becomes more likely the longer lower prices squeeze their oil revenue, Gause said.
Saudi Arabia’s equanimity so far in the face of the plunging price of the commodity that supports most of its public spending reflects multiple policy interests. If the falling price discourages further development of high-cost new oil sources such as shale in the United States, deep-sea wells off Brazil’s coast, or new fields in the Russian Arctic, that helps Saudi Arabia maintain its market share, a declared objective.
And the Saudis seem quite content as the price contraction inflicts economic damage on damage on Iran, their great regional rival, and on Russia, which has incurred Riyadh’s displeasure by supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to whose ouster the Saudis are committed. Egypt, however, is another matter because Sisi has become a major ally of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates in the regional struggle against the Islamic State and other extremist groups.
In a paper distributed last week, Fahad Alturki, head of research at Jadwa Investment Group in Riyadh, predicted that Saudi Arabia will maintain its current levels of spending at least for a while because it has “foreign reserves of more than 95 percent of GDP and a public debt of less than 2 percent of GDP.” Even at today’s prices, he said, the kingdom is likely to show a balance of payments surplus next year and fall into deficit only in 2016.
If the Saudi government did decide to cut spending, however, external aid would probably be one of the first targets, Alturki said.
Oil prices were already descending rapidly because of declining global demand and inventory surpluses when the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided last month not to reduce their production to stabilize the price. That decision sent the price down still further to the apparent satisfaction of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have very deep pockets. Platts Oilgram, a trade journal, reported that “Saudi oil minister Ali Naimi left the summit all smiles, telling reporters that rolling over the 30 million b/d production ceiling was ‘a great decision.’”
The most immediate losers from the price decline are the large producing countries that need the cash to sustain their current operations. According to Alturki’s paper, these include Russia, which needs a price of $107 a barrel to support its budget; Venezuela, which needs $120; and Iran, which needs $127. Alturki’s “baseline” price projection for the next two years is $83 to $85 per barrel. Oil prices are notoriously hard to predict, but his figures are in line with several other analyses that have been published in the past few weeks.
Egypt’s problem is different, and harder to solve. The country produces about 700,000 barrels of oil a day, and its output has declined steadily from a peak of 900,000 barrels in the 1990s, according to the US Energy Information Administration. (Worldwide production is about 92 million barrels.) Almost all of Egypt’s output is consumed domestically by its population of about 80 million.
Because it is not an oil exporter, Egypt depends on other sources of hard-currency revenue to support itself; mostly Suez Canal tolls, cotton exports, and tourism. The tourist trade, however, has dwindled to a trickle over the past few years because of the country’s political upheavals, leaving the country short of cash to pay for imported food and other necessities.
According to Arabian Business magazine, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia committed aid with more than $12 billion in cash grants, no-interest loans, and refined petroleum products in 2014 alone. Kuwait, another major Gulf oil exporter with a small population, kicked in another $4 billion, the magazine reported.
Saudi Arabia pledged to support Sisi almost immediately after he ousted the former president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013. Morsi had been elected as the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which both Egypt and Saudi Arabia have since outlawed. In June, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah reportedly declared that any country that did not join in supporting Egypt would “have no future place among us.” But the king is also doling out tens of billions of dollars in salary increases, new social benefits and housing programs that he extended to his own citizens during the regional uprisings of 2011. He is also paying for massive infrastructure projects such as a new metro rail network for Riyadh and a mammoth new port on the Red Sea. Even Saudi Arabia can’t keep it up indefinitely at $60 a barrel.
]]>Despite escalating tensions and anti-government demonstrations, the Venezuelan government has not addressed any human rights issues regardless of the rising death toll and captive political prisoners, a panel of experts stressed Monday.
Issues such as humanitarian rights, economic policies and governance problems were discussed at the Americas Society/ Council [...]]]>
Despite escalating tensions and anti-government demonstrations, the Venezuelan government has not addressed any human rights issues regardless of the rising death toll and captive political prisoners, a panel of experts stressed Monday.
Issues such as humanitarian rights, economic policies and governance problems were discussed at the Americas Society/ Council of the Americas panel discussion “What’s Next for Venezuela?”.
The panel agreed that the country faces many challenges such as insecurity, rising inflation and lack of staple products, and that the Venezuelan government has been unable to make any swift negotiations, decisions or changes to curb the crisis.
Many of the protests, which began in January, have ended in violent clashes where the death toll has risen to 28, over a thousand arrests have been made and political prisoners have become an issue.
Students and relatives of protesters recently killed in Venezuela march in Caracas on Feb. 22. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS
Although students sparking these demonstrations are bringing attention to humanitarian issues, the government has not responded to their cause, the experts said.
“This has been one of (President Nicolas) Maduro’s most serious mistakes. If you look at the demands of the students, the first is the human rights issues of political prisoners. This has become more central as the protests went on,” said Javier Corrales, professor of Political Science at Amherst College.
In February, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for the protection of human rights of all Venezuelans, and urged authorities to listen to the protesters’ demands.
The Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council also drew attention to the unnecessary use of force and violence against protesters and journalists. However, the Maduro government has not made any serious efforts to investigate human rights abuses.
Accountability for the lack of action has been drawn towards the poor decision making process within the government and the apparent absence of political knowledge.
“The decision making process has been hijacked internally. For them to survive they need to solve the decision making process. So far politics is not in its toolkit. So the first reaction we see is repression and censorship,” said Luisa Palacios, head of Latin America Macro and Energy Research.
The panel referred to the arrest of opposition leader Leópoldo Lopez as part of President Nicolás Maduro’s government’s failure in decision-making.
“They don’t really know how to play politics,”Palaciios said, pointing out a flawed decision-making process that commits the mistake of putting Leópoldo in jail, making a martyr out of a political prisoner.
Palacios also emphasised that international involvement is very important in solving the crisis. She said that the Venezuelan government would not understand the consequences or the point of view of human rights unless it becomes an international issue.
“International involvement will make this a much safer process as we go along. If Venezuelans are left to their devices I remain concerned due to the lack of the government’s political tools.”
Corrales stated that the U.N’s response to the instability and unrest has been far more forceful and remarkable than usual as the U.N’s involvement in Latin American affairs is usually quite low.
He made a comparison to the protests in Brazil and Chile where the governments were able to make immediate negotiations, changes in cabinet and new programmes despite larger demonstrations.
“In Chile, only one person died during two-and-a-half years of protests. The protests were massive, perhaps more massive than in Venezuela. The international community complained about the police force in Chile and only one student died and there were about 1,800 arrests,” Corrales said.
Since Maduro took office in April 2013, he has been accused of following former President Hugo Chávez’s failed policies.
Jassmyn Goh is a trainee at the IPS United Nations bureau in New York City.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Last Thursday, the highly respected, non-profit investigative news agency ProPublica featured a 2,400-word article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, by its award-winning senior reporter, Sebastian Rotella, who has long specialized in terrorism and national-security coverage. In support of its main thesis that Iran [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Last Thursday, the highly respected, non-profit investigative news agency ProPublica featured a 2,400-word article, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America”, by its award-winning senior reporter, Sebastian Rotella, who has long specialized in terrorism and national-security coverage. In support of its main thesis that Iran appears to be expanding its alleged criminal and terrorist infrastructure in Venezuela and other “leftist, populist, anti-U.S. governments throughout the region,” Rotella quotes the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Lt. Gen. James Clapper (ret.), as telling a Senate hearing last year that Iran’s alliances with Venezuela and other “leftist, populist, anti-U.S. government” could pose
…an immediate threat by giving Iran – directly through the IRGC, the Quds Force [an external unit of the IRGC] or its proxies like Hezbollah – a platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States, our interests, and allies.
Now, there is a serious problem with that quotation: Clapper never said any such thing. Indeed, the exact words attributed to the DNI were first spoken at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing entitled “Ahmadinejad’s Tour of Tyrants and Iran’s Agenda in the Western Hemisphere” (page 2) by none other than the Committee’s then-chair, Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose hostility toward Iran is exceeded only by her views on Cuba and Venezuela.* It is, after all, one thing to have the head of the U.S. intelligence community tell Congress that the threat of an attack against the United States from various “platforms” in Latin America is “immediate.” It’s quite another for a far-right Cuban-American congresswomen from Miami to offer that assessment, particularly given her past record of championing Luis Posada Carriles and the late Orlando Bosch, both of whom, according to declassified CIA and FBI documents, were almost certainly involved in the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner, among other terrorist acts.
I personally have no doubt that the misattribution was unintentional and merely the product of sloppiness or negligence. But negligence matters, particularly when it is committed in pursuit of a thesis that Rotella has long propagated (more on that in upcoming posts) and that comes amid an ongoing and well-orchestrated campaign against Iran that could eventually result in war, as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reminded us yet again Sunday. Of course, such a glaring mistake also detracts from the credibility of the rest of the article, much of which is based on anonymous sources whose own credibility is very difficult to assess.
The Iranian threat and anonymous sourcing
Most of the article concerns a hearing with the rather suggestive title, “Threat to the Homeland: Iran’s Extending Influence in the Western Hemisphere”, which was held July 9 by the Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency of the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee with the apparent purpose of rebutting a still-classified State Department report, which included a two-page unclassified appendix concluding that Iran’s influence in the region is actually on the wane. In addition to reporting on the hearing, however, Rotella provides some original reporting of his own in the lede paragraphs, setting an appropriately dark and menacing tone for the rest of his story:
Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited his ally President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, where the firebrand leaders unleashed defiant rhetoric at the United States.
There was a quieter aspect to Ahmadinejad’s visit in January 2012, according to Western intelligence officials. A senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) traveled secretly with the presidential delegation and met with Venezuelan military and security chiefs. His mission: to set up a joint intelligence program between Iranian and Venezuelan spy agencies, according to the Western officials.
At the secret meeting, Venezuelan spymasters agreed to provide systematic help to Iran with intelligence infrastructure such as arms, identification documents, bank accounts and pipelines for moving operatives and equipment between Iran and Latin America, according to Western intelligence officials. Although suffering from cancer, Chavez took interest in the secret talks as part of his energetic embrace of Iran, an intelligence official told ProPublica.
The senior IRGC officer’s meeting in Caracas has not been previously reported.
The aim is to enable the IRGC to be able to distance itself from the criminal activities it is conducting in the region, removing the Iranian fingerprint,” said the intelligence official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. “Since Chavez’s early days in power, Iran and Venezuela have grown consistently closer, with Venezuela serving as a gateway to South America for the Iranians.”
The bold face, added for emphasis, is designed to illustrate Rotella’s heavy reliance on anonymous “intelligence officials”, none of whose nationalities are specified. In the context of an investigative report, that failure begs a series of questions that bear on the credibility of the account.
For example, does he include Israelis in his definition of “Western officials” or “Western intelligence officials?” After all, it would be one thing to cite a Swedish intelligence official who may tend to be somewhat more objective in describing Iranian-Venezuelan intelligence cooperation; it’s quite another to quote an Israeli “official” responsible to a government that has been aggressively promoting a policy of confrontation with Iran for many years now. And if his sources agreed to talk to Rotella only on the condition of being identified as “Western officials” or “Western intelligence officials”, why did they do so? (Indeed, the only identified “Western intelligence official” quoted — or misquoted — by Rotella in the entire article is Clapper.) Identifying at least the nationality of the officials with whom Rotella spoke with would help readers assess their credibility, but he offers no help in that regard.
Moreover, given the details about the meeting provided by Rotella’s sources, why was the senior IRGC officer who set up the purported joint intelligence program with the Venezuelans not named? That omission sticks out like a sore thumb.
But the problems in Rotella’s article go beyond the misattribution of the Ros-Lehtinen quote or his heavy reliance on anonymous sources. Indeed, it took all of about 30 minutes of Googling (most of which was devoted to tracking down the alleged Clapper quote) to discover that the story also includes distortions of the record in relevant criminal proceedings and a major error of fact in reporting the testimony of at least one of the hearing’s four witnesses — all of whom, incidentally, share well-established records of hostility toward Iran.
But before going into the results of my Google foray, let’s hear what a former top U.S. intelligence analyst had to say about Rotella’s article. I asked Paul Pillar, a 28-year CIA veteran who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 (which means he was in charge of the analysis of those regions for the CIA and all other U.S. intelligence agencies), if he could read it. This was his emailed reply:
The article certainly seems to be an effort to go out of the way to raise suspicions about Iranian activities in the hemisphere, by dumping together material that is either old news or not really nefarious, and stringing it together with innuendo. Almost all of the specifics that get into anything like possible terrorist activities are old. The Iranian efforts to make diplomatic friends in Latin America by cozying up with the regimes in Venezuela and elsewhere that have an anti-U.S. streak is all well known, but none of that adds up to an increase in clandestine networks or a terrorist threat. The closest the article gets in that regard is with very vague references to Venezuela being used by “suspected Middle Eastern operatives” and the like, which of course demonstrates nothing as far as Iran specifically is concerned. Sourcing to an unnamed “intelligence officer” is pretty meaningless.
As we will try to show in subsequent posts by Marsha Cohen and Gareth Porter (who both contributed substantially to this post), Pillar’s assessment could apply to a number of Rotella’s articles, especially about the Middle East and alleged Iranian or Hezbollah terrorism, going back to his years at the Los Angeles Times. What virtually all of them have in common is the heavy reliance on anonymous intelligence sources; a mixture of limited original reporting combined with lots of recycled news; a proclivity for citing highly ideological, often staunchly hawkish neoconservative “experts” on Middle East issues from such think tanks as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) without identifying them as such; a surprising deference (considering his status as a investigative reporter) toward “official” accounts or reports by friendly security agencies, some of which work very closely with their Israeli counterparts (see, for example, this 2009 story about an alleged plot against the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan about which Gareth plans to write a post); and a general failure to offer critical analysis or alternative explanations about specific terrorist incidents or groups that are often readily available from academic or other more independent and disinterested regional or local specialists.
Iran in Latin America
In the meantime, it’s also important to set the context for Rotella’s latest article. It came amid an intense campaign over the past couple of years by Iran hawks, including individuals from the various neoconservative think tanks cited above, to highlight the purported terrorist threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah from their Latin American “platforms,” as Ros-Lehtinen put it. Those efforts culminated in legislation, the “Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012,” approved overwhelmingly by Congress last December. Among other provisions, it required the State Department to report to Congress on Iran’s “growing hostile presence and activity in the Western Hemisphere,” along with a strategy for neutralizing it, within six months. That report, only a two-page annex of which were publicly released, was submitted at the end of last month.
To the disappointment of the bill’s chief sponsors, notably the Republican chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Jeff Duncan, the report concluded that, despite an increase in Tehran’s “outreach to the region working to strengthen its political, economic, cultural and military ties, …Iranian influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is waning.” And while the rest of the report remains classified, its contents reportedly were consistent with those of the State Department’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism, also released last month, which found no evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah terrorist plotting or operations in the Americas, in contrast to what it described as a sharp increase of such activity in Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the past year.
Duncan, who, incidentally, spoke on a panel on Evangelical Christian support for Israel at AIPAC’s annual conference last year, and who in 2011 became the only member of Congress given a 100-percent rating on the Heritage Action for America legislative scorecard, expressed outrage at these conclusions, accusing the State Department of failing to “consider all the facts.” In particular, he charged that the State Department had not taken into account new evidence “documenting Iran’s [ongoing] terrorism activities and operations in the Western Hemisphere” compiled by an Argentine prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, in a 502-page report released (perhaps not entirely coincidentally) just one month before the State Department was due to submit its study.
The Nisman Report and the AMIA bombing
In 2006, Nisman, the chief prosecutor in the case of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) building, released an even longer controversial report on that case in which he concluded that the bombing had been ordered by Iran’s top leadership and carried out by Hezbollah operatives under the direction of Iran’s cultural attaché at its Argentine embassy, Mohsen Rabbani. (Gareth wrote his own critique of the 2006 report for the The Nation in 2008, joining many Argentine journalists and researchers in questioning Nisman’s theory of the case. Last week he published a related story for IPS that noted the diminished credibility of Nisman’s primary source, a former Iranian intelligence operative named Abdolghassem Mesbahi. He plans a new series on the subject to begin later this month.) The State Department report, Duncan said at the hearing, “directly contradicts the findings from Mr. Nisman’s three-year investigation, which showed clear infiltration of the Iranian regime within countries in Latin America using embassies, mosques, and cultural centers.”
Indeed, according to Nisman’s new report, Iran, through Rabbani and other operatives, has established “clandestine intelligence stations and operative agents” throughout Latin America, including in Guyana, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago and Uruguay and, most especially in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, a region about which Rotella wrote rather darkly when he was Buenos Aires bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1990’s. (In fact, a 15-year-old article on the TBA as a “Jungle Hub for World’s Outlaws” and a refuge for terrorists was cited by WINEP’s Matthew Levitt in written testimony submitted at last week’s hearing. Long one of Rotella’s favorite sources, Levitt, the subject of a rather devastating (pay-walled) profile by Ken Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine last year, has been a major figure in the U.S.- and Israeli-led campaign to persuade the European Union to list Hezbollah as a terrorist entity, a campaign that has been boosted by Rotella’s work, as reflected in this article published by ProPublica last April. (The symbiotic relationship between the two men may be the subject of a subsequent LobeLog post.)
Nisman, whose new report has been promoted heavily by neoconservative media and institutions over the past six weeks (see, for example, here, here, here, and here), had been invited by the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, to testify at last week’s hearing. But, as noted by Rotella in the article, “his government abruptly barred him from traveling to Washington”, a development which, according to McCaul, constituted a “slap in the face of this committee and the U.S. Congress” and was an indication that Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had no intention to “pursue justice and truth on Iranian involvement in the AMIA bombing.”
(In his message to me, Pillar noted that there were other good reasons why Kirchner would not want to see Nisman “being used as a prop in Duncan’s hearing …[given] other equities …regarding relations with Washington,” including the ongoing lawsuit against Argentina by a group of hedge funds — led by Paul Singer, a billionaire and major funder of hard-line pro-Israel organizations — that have sponsored full-page ads in the Washington Post and other publications highlighting, among other things, Argentina’s allegedly cozy relationship with Iran.)
In his article, Rotella, who appears to have accepted without question the conclusions of Nisman’s 2006 report on the AMIA bombing, also offers an uncritical account of the prosecutor’s latest report, quoting affirmations by Duncan, McCaul, as well as the four witnesses who testified at the hearing that the report’s main contentions were true — Iran and Hezbollah are indeed building up their terrorist infrastructure in the region. “The attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s revealed the existence of Iranian operational networks in the Americas,” Rotella’s writes. “The Argentine investigation connected the plots to hubs of criminal activity and Hezbollah operational and financing cells in lawless zones, such as the triple border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and the border between Colombia and Venezuela.”
The Nisman Report and the JFK Bomb Plot
After noting U.S. Treasury designations in 2008 of two Venezuelans as terrorists “for allegedly raising funds for Hezbollah, discussing terrorist operations with Hezbollah operatives, and aiding travel of militants from Venezuela to training sessions in Iran”, Rotella provides the purported Clapper quote about Venezuela and its allies offering “a platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States, our interests, and allies”, suggesting (falsely) that the DNI himself endorsed Nisman’s view that Iran was behind a plot to attack JFK airport six years ago:
The aborted 2007 plot to attack JFK (airport) was an attempt to use that platform, according to the Argentine special prosecutor. A Guyanese-American Muslim who had once worked as a cargo handler conceived an idea to blow up jet fuel tanks at the airport. He formed a homegrown cell that first sought aid from al Qaida, then coalesced around Abdul Kadir, a Guyanese politician and Shiite Muslim leader.
The trial in New York federal court revealed that Kadir was a longtime intelligence operative for Iran, reporting to the Iranian ambassador in Caracas and communicating also with Rabbani, the accused AMIA plotter.
‘Kadir agreed to participate in the conspiracy, committing himself to reach out to his contacts in Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ Nisman’s report says. ‘The entry of Kadir into the conspiracy brought the involvement and the support of the intelligence station established in Guyana by the Islamic regime.’
Police arrested Kadir as he prepared to fly to Iran to discuss the New York plot with Iranian officials. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
But this account of the case is tendentious, to say the least, and here I am relying on Gareth’s research into the case, which he covered in an IPS story last week. While Rotella claimed that the would-be terrorist “cell” had “coalesced around” Kadir, the original criminal complaint that was submitted to the U.S. district court in New York on which the arrests of the four men accused in the plot were based makes clear that Kadir was a secondary participant at the time the arrest was made. In addition, the complaint made no mention of any ties between Kadir and Iran.
Moreover, Rotella’s assertion that the trial revealed Kadir to have been “longtime intelligence operative for Iran” is unfounded, apparently based on nothing more than a set of personal letters Kadir had sent by ordinary mail to Rabbani and the Iranian ambassador to Venezuela and the fact that some contact information for Rabbani was found in Kadir’s address book.
But Kadir’s letters to Rabbani were clearly not the work of an Iranian intelligence operative. They consisted of publicly available information about the political, social and economic situation in Guyana, where Kadir was a member of parliament. Indeed, the fact that they were sent by regular mail — and the lack of any known replies by the addressees — suggests that Kadir’s relationship to Iranian intelligence was even more distant and less interactive than that of George Zimmerman’s to the Seminole County sheriff’s office in Florida.
During the subsequent trial in 2010, the prosecution tried to play up the letters and even asked Kadir if he was a spy for Iran, which he denied strongly. No other evidence implicating Iran in the plot was introduced. Even the U.S. Attorney’s press release issued after Kadir’s sentencing (and discoverable within mini-seconds on Google) offers no indication that Iran had any knowledge of the plot at the time of his arrest. Finally, if indeed the U.S. government had acquired any evidence that Rabbani or any other Iranian official had a role in the plot, as asserted by Nisman, it seems reasonable to ask why he wasn’t indicted along with Kadir and the three others? Yet, in spite of all these factors, Rotella appears to accept Nisman’s argument that the Iranian government had a role in the case and that Kadir was its “long-time intelligence operative” presumably in charge of its “intelligence station” in Guyana.
Rotella next cites the purported testimony (of unknown origin) of Fernando Tabares, the former director of Colombia’s intelligence agency who
…described a mission by an Iranian operative to Colombia via Venezuela in 2008 or 2009. Working with Iranian officials based at the embassy in Bogota, the operative, according to Nisman’s report, ‘was looking at targets in order to carry out possible attacks here in Colombia,’ Tabares testified.
Apart from the vagueness of this account about the unidentified Iranian operative and his mission — as well as the absence of any corroborating evidence — Rotella omitted the easily discoverable fact (via Google) that Tabares himself was sentenced in 2010 to eight years in prison for abuse of trust and illegal wire-tapping, a detail that may reflect on the former intelligence chief’s credibility.
Iranian migrants (refugees?) to Canada
A couple of paragraphs later, Rotella cites the testimony of Joseph Humire, “a security expert” and one of the four witnesses who testified at last week’s hearing. According to Rotella, Humire, executive director at the Center for a Secure Free Society
…cited a report last year in which the Canadian Border Services Agency described Iran as the top source of illegal migrants to Canada, most of them coming through Latin America. Between 2009 and 2011, the majority of those Iranian migrants passed through Caracas, where airport and airline personnel were implicated in providing them with fraudulent documents, according to the Canadian border agency.
But Rotella misreports Humire’s testimony. Humire did not say that Iran was the top source of illegal migrants to Canada; he said Iran was the top source country of improperly documented migrants who make refugee claims in Canada — a not insignificant difference, particularly because the number of Iranian asylum-seekers who come to Canada each year averages only at about 300, according to the CSBA report, which noted that 86% won their asylum claims. In addition, the report, a heavily redacted copy of which was graciously provided to me by Humire, indicates that, between 2009 and 2012, more of these migrants flew into Canada from Mexico City and London than from Caracas.
Moreover, the picture painted by the redacted CSBA report is considerably less frightening than that offered by either Rotella or, for that matter, Humire’s testimony.
Many of these migrants use “facilitators” to enter Canada, according to the report. “…Information provided by the migrants on their smugglers suggest possible links to organized criminal elements both within and outside of Canada…Many people seeking refuge in Canada use fake documents and rely on middlemen to help them flee persecution in their homelands.“
“While Iranian irregular migrants mainly enter Canada to make refugee claims, it is possible that certain individuals may enter with more sinister motives”, the report cautioned, observing that 19 Iranian immigrants had been denied entry on security grounds since 2008.
So, instead of the flood of Iranian operatives pouring into Canada, as suggested by Rotella, what we are talking about is a relatively small number of Iranians who are seeking asylum from a repressive regime. And, like hundreds of thousands of other refugees around the world, they rely on traffickers who provide them with forged or otherwise questionable documents. A few of these may be entering Canada for “more sinister motives”, but Rotella offers no concrete evidence that they have done so.
Yet Rotella follows his brief — if fundamentally flawed — summary of Humire’s remarks about Iranian asylum-seekers in Canada with his own riff, going “out of the way to raise suspicions about Iranian activities,” as Pillar notes, and returning once again to those anonymous “security officials” as his sources.
Humire’s allegations are consistent with interviews in recent years in which U.S., Latin America and Israeli security officials have told ProPublica about suspected Middle Eastern operatives and Latin American drug lords obtaining Venezuelan documents through corruption or ideological complicity.
“There seems to be an effort by the Venezuelan government to make sure that Iranians have a full set of credentials,” a U.S. law enforcement official said.
Last year’s secret talks between Iranian and Venezuelan spies intensified such cooperation, according to Western intelligence officials who described the meetings to ProPublica. The senior Iranian officer who traveled with the presidential entourage asked Venezuelan counterparts to ensure access to key officials in the airport police, customs and other agencies and “permits for transferring cargo through airports and swiftly arranging various bureaucratic matters,” the intelligence official said.
Venezuelan leaders have denied that their alliance with Iran has hostile intent. They have rejected concerns about flights that operated for years between Caracas and Tehran. The State Department and other U.S. agencies criticized Venezuela for failing to make public passenger and cargo manifests and other information about secretive flights to Iran, raising the fear of a pipeline for clandestine movement of people and goods.
The flights have been discontinued, U.S. officials say.
ProPublica’s high standards
I personally believe that ProPublica, since it launched its operations in 2008, has performed an invaluable public service in providing high-quality investigative journalism at a time when the genre risked (and still risks) becoming virtually extinct. As a result, readers of the agency have come to expect its articles not only to compile existing information that is already publicly available in ways that connect the dots, but also provide important, previously unpublished material with important insights into the events of the day in ways that seriously challenge conventional wisdom as defined by mainstream media and, as ProPublica’s mission statement puts it, “those with power.” The question posed by Rotella’s latest article — as well as other work he has published on alleged Iranian and Hezbollah terrorism — is whether it meets the mission and high standards that ProPublica readers expect.
Given the misattribution of a quotation critical to the story’s thesis; the prolific use of anonymous “Western intelligence sources” and the like; the citation of sources with a clear ideological or political axe to grind; the omission of information that could bear on those sources’ credibility; the more or less uncritical acceptance of official reports that are known to be controversial but that generally reflect the interests of the axe-grinders; and the failure to confirm misinformation that can be quickly searched and verified, one can’t help but ask whether Rotella’s work meets ProPublica’s standards.
That question takes on additional and urgent importance given the subject — alleged terrorist activities by Iran and Hezbollah — Rotella specializes in. All of us remember the media’s deplorable failure to critically challenge the Bush administration’s allegations — and those of anonymous “Western intelligence sources”, etc. — about Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as his vast and fast-growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including a supposedly advanced nuclear-weapons program. We now have, in many respects, a comparable situation with respect to Iran. Bearing that history in mind, any media organization — but especially one of ProPublica’s stature and mission — should be expected to make extraordinary efforts not only to verify its information, reduce its reliance on anonymous sources and avoid innuendo, but also to aggressively challenge “official” narratives or those that are quite obviously being promoted as part of a campaign by parties with a clear interest in confrontation — even war — with Iran. The stakes are unusually high.
Gareth Porter and Marsha Cohen contributed substantially to this report.
*Today, shortly before this blog post was published and one day after I contacted the DNI press office to confirm that the quotation had been misattributed to DNI Clapper, ProPublica issued the following correction: “Due to an error in testimony by a congressional witness, this story initially misattributed a statement made by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. The story has been revised to correct the attribution and incorporate Clapper’s actual statement to a Senate committee.” In my view, the wording of the correction, suggesting that the misattribution was the fault of a witness, underlines the importance of scrupulous fact-checking when dealing with such a charged issue. As noted above, Clapper was the only identified Western intelligence official cited in the article, and his quotation — or non-quotation — is critical to the overall credibility of the underlying thesis: that Iran and Hezbollah are building a terrorist infrastructure in the Americas aimed at the U.S.
UPDATE: Apparently, the witness who misattributed the Ros-Lehtinen/Clapper quote was the AFPC’s Ilan Berman (who most recently misattributed the quote in a usnews.com op-ed co-authored by Netanel Levitt on July 15). Berman, a leading figure in the sanctions campaign against Iran, suggested shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that Washington should pursue regime change in Iran.
Photo Credit: Prensa Miraflores
]]>by Daniel Luban
The death of Hugo Chavez has triggered a predictably dizzying amount of commentary, and I’ll leave it to the experts to evaluate his complicated legacy in Venezuela and in Latin America more broadly. The accusations of “totalitarianism” from the right were clearly absurd and hypocritical — whatever his [...]]]>
by Daniel Luban
The death of Hugo Chavez has triggered a predictably dizzying amount of commentary, and I’ll leave it to the experts to evaluate his complicated legacy in Venezuela and in Latin America more broadly. The accusations of “totalitarianism” from the right were clearly absurd and hypocritical — whatever his misdeeds, Chavez’s record paled in comparison to the right’s favorite juntas from the Cold War era. On the other hand, after talking to those more knowledgeable about Venezuela than I am, I get the sense that even many who were sympathetic to Chavez’s broad goals ended up being rather disappointed in him, and that opening up space for a generation of Latin American leaders who might share many of his virtues without some of his vices might be his greatest legacy in the region.
But domestic politics aside, Chavez is also noteworthy as a champion — perhaps the last prominent champion — of the kind of “anti-imperialist” politics characteristic of the Cold War era.
(I put “anti-imperialist” in quotes to emphasize that this style of politics was a historically specific phenomenon, not synonymous with opposition to imperialism in general.) Gamel Abdel Nasser was probably the progenitor of this style, and it proved highly influential on leftism during the Cold War — above all, in its frequent identification of imperialism with capitalism, and capitalism with the United States and Western Europe.
Chavez played from this script throughout his political career, initially with a fair amount of success. This success, of course, was centrally tied to the fact that the US and its allies frequently played their own (imperialist) role to the hilt as well. Most strikingly, there was the Bush administration’s endorsement of the 2002 coup against Chavez; more ubiquitously, there were all the free-trade pacts and IMF austerity programs imposed throughout Latin America in that period. Chavez’s brand of anti-imperialism resonated, in other words, because it frequently continued to jibe with reality.
Still, recent years have revealed the limits of the old Cold War anti-imperialism, and Chavez’s reputation (on the left as much as elsewhere) has suffered as a result. The Arab Spring, in particular, demonstrated the pitfalls of taking every regime at odds with the US as an exemplar of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. By continuing to view the world through the Cold War prism, as Juan Cole notes, Chavez found himself in bed with Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he insisted on seeing in them models of socialist self-determination that had little or nothing to do with reality. (One does not have to favor US. intervention in Syria, Libya, or Iran to understand that anyone who views their leaders as heroic anti-imperialists deserving our steadfast support has gone badly astray.)
Some on the left take these developments as evidence that Chavez took a wrong turn — that he went from champion of liberation to apologist for tyranny. I think, on the contrary, that he was fairly consistent, and that the things he got wrong indicate the weaknesses of his underlying style of politics (just as the things he got right indicate its strengths.) In any case, the style itself was a throwback to an earlier era, and it may very well die with Chavez.
]]>via IPS News
Graphic: The figures signify the number of times each country was mentioned in the Oct. 22 presidential debate. Credit: Zachary Fleischmann/IPS
U.S. strategy in the Greater Middle East, which has dominated foreign policy-making since the 9/11 attacks more than 11 years ago, similarly dominated the third and last debate between [...]]]>
via IPS News
Graphic: The figures signify the number of times each country was mentioned in the Oct. 22 presidential debate. Credit: Zachary Fleischmann/IPS
U.S. strategy in the Greater Middle East, which has dominated foreign policy-making since the 9/11 attacks more than 11 years ago, similarly dominated the third and last debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney Monday night.
The biggest surprise of the debate, which was supposed to be devoted exclusively to foreign policy and national security, was how much Romney agreed with Obama’s approach to the region.
His apparent embrace of the president’s policies appeared consistent with his recent efforts to reassure centrist voters that he is not as far right in his views as his primary campaign or his choice for vice president, Rep. Joe Ryan, would suggest.
The focus on the Greater Middle East, which took up roughly two-thirds of the 90-minute debate, reflected a number of factors in addition to the perception that the region is the main source of threats to U.S. security, a notion that Romney tried hard to foster during the debate.
“It’s partly because all candidates have to pander to Israel’s supporters here in the United States, but also four decades of misconduct have made the U.S. deeply unpopular in much of the Arab and Islamic world,” Stephen Walt, a Harvard international relations professor who blogs on foreignpolicy.com, told IPS.
“Add to that the mess Obama inherited from (George W.) Bush, and you can see why both candidates had to keep talking about the region,” he said.
But the region’s domination in the debate also came largely at the expense of other key regions, countries and global issues – testimony to the degree to which Bush’s legacy, particularly from his first term when neo-conservatives and other hawks ruled the foreign-policy roost, continues to define Washington’s relationship to the world.
Of all the countries cited by the moderator and the two candidates, China was the only one outside the Middle East that evoked any substantial discussion, albeit limited to trade and currency issues.
Romney re-iterated his pledge to label Beijing a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office, while Obama for the first time described Beijing as an “adversary” as well as a “partner” – a reflection of how China-bashing has become a predictable feature of presidential races since the end of the Cold War.
With the exception of one very short reference (by Romney) to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and another to trade with Latin America, Washington’s southern neighbours were completely ignored by the two candidates, as was Canada and all of sub-Saharan Africa, except Somalia and Mali where Romney charged that “al Qaeda-type individuals” had taken over the northern part of the country.
Not even the long-running financial crisis in the European Union (EU) – arguably, one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security and economic recovery – came up, although Romney warned several times that the U.S. could become “Greece” if it fails to tackle its debt problems.
Similarly, the big emerging democracies, including India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia – all of which have been wooed by the Obama administration – went entirely unmentioned, although at least one commentator, Tanvi Madan, head of the Indian Project at the Brookings Institution, said Indians should “breathe a sigh of relief” over its omission since it signaled a lack of controversy over Washington’s relations with New Delhi.
Another key emerging democracy, Turkey, was mentioned several times, but only in relation to the civil war in Syria.
And climate change or global warming, which has been considered a national-security threat by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon for almost a decade, was a no-show at the debate.
“There was no serious discussion of climate change, the Euro crisis, the failed drug war, or the long-term strategic consequences of drone wars, cyberwar, and an increasingly ineffective set of global institutions,” noted Walt.
“Neither candidate offered a convincing diagnosis of the challenges we face in a globalised world, or the best way for the U.S. to advance its interests and values in a world it no longer dominates.”
Romney, whose top foreign-policy advisers include key neo-conservatives who were major promoters of Bush’s misadventures in the region, spent much of the debate repeatedly assuring the audience that he would be the un-Bush when it came to foreign policy.
“We don’t want another Iraq,” he said at one point in an apparent endorsement of Obama’s drone strategy. “We don’t want another Afghanistan. That’s not the right course for us.”
“I want to see peace,” he asserted somewhat awkwardly as he began his summation, suggesting that it was a talking point his coaches told him he must impress upon his audience before he left the hall in Boca Raton, Florida.
“Romney clearly decided he needed to head off perceptions of himself as a throwback to George W. Bush-era foreign policy adventurism, repeatedly stressing his desire for a peaceful world,” wrote Greg Sargent, a Washington Post blogger.
So strongly did he affirm most of Obama’s policies that, for those who hadn’t been paying close attention to Romney’s previous stands, the president’s charge that his rival’s foreign policy was “wrong and reckless” must have sounded somewhat puzzling.
As Obama was forced to remind the audience repeatedly, Romney’s positions on these issues have been “all over the map” since he launched his candidacy more than two years ago.
“I found it confusing, because he has spent much of the campaign season in some ways recycling Bush’s foreign policy, and, at least for one night, he seemed to throw the neo-cons under the bus,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Whether it was accepting the withdrawal timetable in Afghanistan, walking back a more aggressive stance on Syria, or basically agreeing with Obama’s approach on Iran, he seems to be stepping away from a lot of the positions he was taking just a few weeks ago,” he noted. “At this point, it’s impossible for voters to actually know what he thinks because he spent most of the campaign embracing a platform that was much further to the right.”
That Obama, who took the offensive from the outset and retained it for the next 90 minutes, won the debate was conceded by virtually all but the most partisan Republican commentators, with some analysts calling the president’s performance as decisive a victory as that which Romney achieved in the first debate earlier this month and which reversed his then-fading fortunes.
A CBS/Knowledge Networks poll of undecided voters taken immediately after the debate found that 53 percent of respondents thought Obama had won; only 23 percent saw Romney as the victor.
Whether that will be sufficient to reverse Romney’s recent gains in the polls – national surveys currently show a virtual tie among likely voters – remains to be seen.
Foreign policy remains a relatively minor issue in the minds of the vast majority of voters concerned mostly about the economy and jobs – one reason why, at every opportunity, Romney Monday tried, with some success, to steer the debate back toward those problems.
]]>A search through the profuse amount of articles written about Monday’s Ahmadinejad-Chavez meeting resulted in at least one piece of unique commentary. At the very bottom of a Bloomberg piece ostentatiously titled “Ahmadinejad Woos Chavez-Led Allies as He Hunts Influence in U.S. Backyard” was the following passage:
Farideh Farhi, an Iran specialist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, said that U.S. fears are raised every time Ahmadinejad visits the “same four countries” and then subside when he leaves.
“No one’s talking any more about the 400-member Iranian embassy in Nicaragua,” Farhi said in a phone interview. “I guess someone checked and there’s nothing like that there.”
Farhi’s final statement refers to the unsubstantiated claim by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (made in the same year of the Caracas-Damascus-Tehran flight declaration) that the Iranians were “building a huge embassy in Managua…And you can only imagine what that’s for.” The fact that a menacing mega embassy was never found in Nicaragua was of far less consequence for Clinton’s reputation or her sources than for those who reported the story. And as Tel Aviv-based analyst Meir Javedanfar reminded us in July, despite all the hype, “Iran’s embassy in Mangua is still small, much like its aid and presence.”
I asked Farhi to expand on her comments with some questions of my own. Why is there so much hype around this event, why is Ahmadinejad making this trip now and what does Iran’s “growing influence” in Latin America actually amount to? Her response:
This is not the first time he has visited Latin America and this is not the first time that we’re seeing talk of Iran’s growing influence there. The talk of growing influence suits hardliners both in Iran and the U.S. Ahmadinejad gets mileage out of these trips by showcasing the so-called fruits of his aggressive foreign policy. Not only is Tehran not isolated, he claims, it is also making headway in the U.S.’s backyard. The hardliners on this side also get mileage out of the imagined Iranian threat operating just next door. In reality, Ahmadinejad is traveling to Latin America now because he has been invited to attend Daniel Ortega’s inauguration. He rarely turns down an invitation especially since he gets few invitations these days. Despite his large entourage, he is only traveling to countries that essentially have challenging relations with the U.S. and in these countries it is Chavez that is in tbe driver’s seat and not Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad is enjoying the ride while he can and he has yet to fulfill most of the economic promises he has made to the leaders of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, including Ortega.
On Monday Mideast scholar Juan Cole blogged on this topic while discussing Iran’s Latin American interests. Despite Tehran’s “taunting”, the isolated, weakened country is actually “desperate” to show that it has friends while it’s being strangled by its adversaries, he notes. Considering regular warmongering about the “threat” of Iran, that’s the big deal many are missing.
]]>Yet [...]]]>
Yet AEI’s Danielle Pletka, that very same think-tank vice president, continues to confound expectations. In her latest post on AEI’s Enterprise Blog, she offers conspiracy theories that obliquely revive former AEI fellow David Frum‘s “Axis of Evil” phrasing, and backing them up with… not much. She ends with kicker designed to elicit fear, and links to an article that contradicts her whole point.
Pletka’s piece warns about the threat of a coalition between Russia, Iran and Venezuela. her headline quips: “Connect the Dots — But Don’t Call It an Axis of…” She’s perhaps acknowledging that Iraq’s membership in the first “Axis of Evil,” and the subsequent disastrous war, makes the term politically ill-advised.
It’s a short post — just eight sentences — and her point is that Russia is going to help Venezuela open a nuclear power plant and possibly sell Hugo Chavez the S-300 air defense missiles that Iran was due to purchase (but didn’t when Russia, under U.S. pressure, backed out of the reportedly $800 million deal).
In light of Venezuela’s ties to Iran, Pletka is worried all this is very suspect, and Venezuela might ship the air defense missiles to Iran. “One might reasonably suspect that any weaponry headed for Caracas could easily find its way to Tehran,” is her endnote.
But then she links to a September 14th Fox News story about how a weekly Caracas-Damascus-Tehran flight has actually been cancelled. The article, which cites an Iranian right-wing pseudonymous former CIA spy as a source, calls the flight path a “terror flight.”
It’s no wonder that one of Pletka’s former AEI researchers added his perspective on her scholarship to Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic blog last year. The researcher’s job was “to provide specific evidence to support ready made assertions,” and describes Pletka’s work as the “academic equivalent of mad libs.” “The form is set by the neoconservative agenda, and she mobilizes a narrative that fills in the blanks to serve that agenda.”
Perhaps in her kicker, Pletka meant to demonstrate that such equipment has been “easily” transported before, at some previous time. Therefore, it can happen again. But that’s not what the link she supplied said: It said that there was a potential channel for equipment to move between Venezuela and Iran, but it’s been shut down.
It’s just like saying neoconservatives have before, at some previous time, led the country into a Middle East war with fuzzy facts and bellicose rhetoric. Unlike the “terror flight,” though, neocons are still at it.
]]>- Reuters: Louis Charbonneau reports on calls from the U.S., British and French envoys to the UN to expedite the formation a UN panel to monitor Iran’s compliance with sanctions. “We are concerned by the delay in setting up the panel, and we urge a renewed focus to enable this body to become operational as soon as possible,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice told the Security Council during a meeting on Iran. The council had agreed in June to set up an expert panel to regularly report on the sanctions. Rice said that Iran has violated that sanctions and has repeatedly tried to export arms and “continues to engage in activities related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”
- Forbes: Vice President of the hawkish American Foreign Policy Council, Ilan Berman, warns that if the U.S. or Israel is compelled to use force against Iran, “China will shoulder at least part of the blame.” Berman says that while both UN and U.S. unilateral sanctions have made an impact, Chinese oil, gas and railroad deals with Iran threatens to undermine the effects of international sanctions. The solution, argues Berman, might lie in prohibiting U.S. contracts with certain Chinese companies or denying loans from U.S. institutions for companies which engage in trade with Iran. He concludes, “[The U.S.] can have a consolidated international economic front that stands a prayer of derailing Iran’s nuclear drive, or it can have a non-confrontational relationship with China. It cannot, however, have both.”
- Los Angeles Times: As hawks continue to focus on countries that have trade and nuclear deals with Iran, John Bolton hones in on Venezuela. “[Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez’s growing closeness with Russia and Iran on nuclear matters should be our greatest concern,” writes the former Bush Administration ambassador to the UN. He points to Venezuela’s sale of refined petroleum products to Iran, helping the latter work around sanctions; unsubstantiated reports of Hezbollah using Venezuela as a base; and Iran’s “helping [Venezuela] develop its uranium reserves.” He says the nuclear cooperation “may signal a dangerous clandestine nuclear weapons effort, perhaps as a surrogate for Iran, as has been true elsewhere, such as in Syria.”
- NBC News: In a sometimes contentious interview with NBC‘s Andrea Mitchell, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that recent IAEA pressure on Iran was “part of the hostility of the United States against our people.” Just ahead of his visit to New York next week for the UN General Assembly, Ahmadinejad held forth on many topics, including Obama’s intention to thaw hostilities with Iran: “We think maybe President Obama wants to do something, but there are pressures– pressure groups in the United States who do not allow him to do so,” he said, later specifically referencing “Zionists.” While Ahmadinejad welcomed warming relations with the U.S., he said that sanctions were useless: “We in Iran are in a position to meet our own requirements.”