Ahmadinejad's tour tests
non-alignment By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
PALO ALTO, California - In the
midst of a rapidly worsening international crisis
centered on Iran's nuclear program, Iran's
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is on a tour of
several Latin American countries, hoping to
capitalize on cross-continent solidarity with
nations with similar anti-hegemonic stances to
minimize the impact of the Western onslaught of
sanctions and military threats.
Ahmadinejad met Venezuela's President Hugo
Chavez on Monday in Caracas on his first stop of a
tour that will also take him to Nicaragua, Cuba
and Ecuador.
Chavez commented that Iran
faced "US warmongering threats", adding that "we
are very worried" over the pressure being placed
on Iran by the United States
and its allies. "They present us as aggressors,"
he said.
The US media is awash with
scornful depictions of Ahmadinejad's Latin trip,
such as calling it a "tour of tyrants".
"What the empire does makes you laugh,"
Chavez stated on Venezuelan TV ahead of
Ahmadinejad's arrival, perhaps with a degree of
legitimacy, given that the US has called Iran's
announcement of starting uranium enrichment at a
new underground facility near the city of Qom as a
"provocation".
In fact, the site is under
the inspection regime of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and any military diversion -
as some say is happening in Iran - would be
readily detected by the United Nations' atomic
watchdog.
It little matters that the US
has recently set up new uranium enrichment
facilities that are not even inspected by the
IAEA, and the fact that the US, France and Britain
give themselves the license to modernize their
nuclear arsenals while at the same time holding
the banner of counter-proliferation around the
world; this speaks volumes about the unjust and
hierarchical nature of today's global politics.
In a sign of Iran's impatience with the
US's coercive policy - including a move to curb
countries from dealing with its central bank -
Tehran has imposed the death penalty on an
Iranian-American accused of spying.
Amir
Mirzaei Hekmati, 28, was sentenced to death on
Monday after being convicted of espionage for the
US Central Intelligence Agency. The former marine
had been detained last August in Iran. Hopefully
tempers on both sides will subside and the
sentence will be commuted.
Red carpet
in Latin America What binds countries such
as Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador and
Bolivia is their shared antinomy to a rigid
Western domination of international affairs to the
detriment of the majority of the world community
that are members of the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM), which is slated to be led by Iran in 2012;
the summit of NAM leaders in Iran was initially
schedule for mid-summer but reportedly has been
postponed.
A number of hegemonic
mouthpieces in the West have recently penned that
the West should try to knock NAM out of existence
when Iran assumes its presidency.
Yet NAM
is a viable, and vital, source of anti-hegemony, a
building bloc of Third World politics at a crucial
time when the unbound Western powers and their
military alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), are taking advantage of the
Middle East turmoil to expand their influence.
This they are doing by reverting to old
neo-colonial policies, reflected in the recent
assault on Libya and the quest for control of
Libyan oil.
At this critical juncture, the
battle over Iran is indeed a litmus test of the
NAM's independence and will to fight back and keep
at bay the tsunami of coercive Western hegemony,
rationalized by a whole army of Western academics
and media pundits.
It is clear that the
Western struggle against Iran is tightly connected
to the hegemonic powers' attempt to consolidate
their hold on world affairs and to deliver a
powerful jab to the widening net of the NAM, which
openly contests the nuclear club nations' failure
to implement their responsibilities toward
disarmament under the terms of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In other words,
if the US, France and Britain and their
neo-imperialist partners achieve their objectives
against Iran, that is, first weakening the country
economically and then ripening it for outright
invasion and military assault, that would be a
lethal blow to the global counter-hegemonic
alliance that includes the Latin nations mentioned
above.
But, by all indications, the new,
post-Cold War order is beyond the pale of pure
hegemony, and both the NAM and the mushrooming of
new regional formations such as Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, led by China and Russia,
reflect a more complex and heterogeneous global
reality more akin to multi-polarism than
Western-centric pure and simple.
As a
result, it is far from given that the combined
weight of Western pressure on Iran will succeed in
isolating it and consigning it to become another
Iraq or Libya.
For one thing, Iran's
military power is far more advanced - its naval
power in the Persian Gulf alone is capable of
delivering major blows to enemy attacks,
imperiling oil transfers out of the narrow
waterways of the Strait of Hormuz - thus making
the Western military option on Iran a costly one
for Western economies. In turn, this allows Iran
to play brinksmanship, much to the chagrin of
hegemonic mouthpieces in the Western media.
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