THE
ROVING EYE Ahmadinejad be
damned By Pepe Escobar
It's all over the Iranian press: President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad, self-described "street cleaner
of the people", is in deep political trouble at
home, subjected to crossfire from conservatives
and reformers alike. All the more ironic
considering the biblical tsunami of Washington
spin portraying Ahmadinejad as the newest "new
Hitler" (Saddam Hussein, after all, fell victim to
a lynch mob).
As far as geopolitical
strategy is concerned, it's as if Ahmadinejad
might be as clueless as his US counterpart,
President George W
Bush. Well, it's not that
simple. The conservative Etemad e-Melli newspaper
rhetorically asked what exactly the Iranian
president was up to in Latin America while US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was lobbying
dictatorial Arab regimes - from Egypt to Saudi
Arabia - to deep-freeze Iran over alleged
"interference" in Iraq.
Well, he was
consolidating what the White House already regards
as the new "axis of evil" - the strategic
relationship between Iran and Venezuela, sealed
last September during Ahmadinejad's first visit to
Caracas, right inside what the US historically
considered its "back yard".
The
ultra-conservative Keyhan newspaper, very close to
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei,
could not help but consider it "a great victory
for the diplomacy of Ahmadinejad's government".
In the lightning-quick Latin America tour
that took him to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador,
meeting re-elected leftist stalwart Hugo Chavez,
the recently elected former guerrillero
Daniel Ortega, and US-educated economist Rafael
Correa, the key Ahmadinejad stop was in Caracas. A
joint Iran-Venezuela US$2 billion fund for myriad
projects will also benefit other friendly
developing countries in Latin America and Africa
that, in Chavez' words, "are making efforts to
liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke".
Both Iran and Venezuela are key members of
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Washington's nemesis Chavez once again was clear:
"There's too much crude in the market." So both
presidents agreed on Saturday to lobby OPEC for a
further cut in production to boost crude-oil
prices.
That's not what major OPEC
producer Saudi Arabia wants - or what Washington
"suggested" Riyadh not to want. OPEC had already
reduced production by 1.2 million barrels a day in
November and will reduce by another 500,000
barrels a day from February 1.
Both Chavez
and Ahmadinejad want more - Chavez to fuel his
ambitious domestic social programs, Ahmadinejad at
least to start a few. Even if global oil prices
fell sharply - an unlikely scenario - Venezuelan
analysts project that Chavez would still proceed
full speed ahead with oil at $30 a barrel. But for
Iran, that would be an economic disaster.
To boost Washington's ire to stratospheric
levels, Chavez once again stressed that the
Bolivarian and the Islamic revolutions were
"sisters" - a link impeccably translated by the
official exchange of gifts: Ahmadinejad received a
Persian translation of a book on Simon Bolivar,
the great South American liberator, while Chavez
received a Spanish translation of a book on
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's
1979 revolution.
Now shut up and
work Ahmadinejad being hailed as a
post-modern co-liberator of South America was not
enough to placate criticism back in his part of
the world. For the conservative Iranian religious
newspaper Jomhouri Islami - also very close to
Khamenei - in an unusually blunt article, the
president's non-stop interference with the nuclear
dossier was viewed as ruining Iranian diplomacy
(Ahmadinejad expelled experienced diplomats from
the Foreign Office in 2005, sprinkling it with his
Revolutionary Guard allies).
The article
aptly translates the fierce battle going on in the
opaque nationalist theocracy's corridors of power.
And Ahmadinejad's faction appears to be losing the
battle. The Supreme Leader - who is responsible
for the nuclear dossier anyway - seems to have had
enough, and has in essence ordered the president
to shut up.
Khamenei and his supporters -
the clerics' faction - believe that Ahmadinejad's
explosive tirades have been used as firepower by
the US to persuade the United Nations Security
Council to impose sanctions on Iran. In addition,
Ahmadinejad's faction - via his mentor Ayatollah
Mesbah Yazdi - lost ground in last month's
election to the Council of Experts, the only body
that can hold the Supreme Leader to account.
Victory went to perennial Machiavellian Hashemi
Rafsanjani - who leads a moderate, semi-secular
faction hostile to Ahmadinejad's.
There's
now ample speculation in Tehran that new, Supreme
Leader-appointed faces will shake up Iran's
nuclear negotiation team. And in the middle of all
this, eyebrows East and West were raised when
Keyhan slipped in an editorial last Friday saying
that Iran "is only a few steps away from becoming
a nuclear power". Was that a fact, a warning, or a
figure of speech?
Ahmadinejad anyway will
have to shelve his rhetoric - and start
delivering. A group of reformist and moderate
Parliament members is signing petitions to force
him to explain his (non-existent) policies.
Jomhouri Islami even issued a prescription: "Speak
about the nuclear issue only during important
national occasions, stop provoking aggressor
powers like the United States, and concentrate
more on the daily needs of the people." Not to
mention fulfilling electoral promises of fighting
inflation, corruption and the oil mafia.
Keeping Ahmadinejad on a leash will be a
crucial part of the nationalist theocracy's
strategy of doing everything in its power not to
incur further US wrath - as the Bush
administration escalates its formidable array of
acts of provocation. Ahmadinejad is now seen as
too much of a loose cannon to be left to his own
devices - especially when 45 centuries of
accumulated Persian diplomacy can be effectively
deployed.
Iran enjoys good political
relations with the majority of countries around
the world - especially in the South. The glaring
exceptions are the US and Israel. Iran is not a
backward, repressive regime like Saudi Arabia. The
talk in Tehran is that the Supreme Leader and
professional diplomats have concluded that the
best course of action for Iran is to ride the
tempest of provocations - sanctions, illegal raids
on consulates, US intelligence infiltrating
sensitive Khuzestan province, encirclement by
nuclear-equipped aircraft carriers, propaganda
over Iranian "networks" killing Americans in Iraq
- while advancing Iran's interests in Lebanon,
Central Asia, China, Russia and South America.
Washington might need to start
manufacturing another "new Hitler".
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