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Chávez in Iran

Solidarity and cooperation trump U.S. threats

Published Aug 5, 2006 12:12 AM

The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, was given a hero’s welcome in Iran when he stopped there on July 29-30 toward the end of a whirlwind tour that also has taken him to Argentina, Belarus, Russia and Vietnam.


In appreciation of Venezuela’s
support at this critical moment,
President Ahmadinejad presents
Hugo ChChávezvez with Iran’s most
prestigious award, the medal of honor
of the Islamic Republic. Both men are
standing in front of photo.

The Venezuelan leader declared his solidarity with Iran, a country on George W. Bush’s prime hit list—his so-called “axis of evil.” It was a courageous stand taken at a time when Washington is threatening Teheran with sanctions, U.S. troops are still occupying Iraq, and Israel is carrying out yet another invasion in the Middle East, with Washington’s blessing, while continuing its military assaults on the Palestinian people.

Chávez’s visit was a declaration to the world that international solidarity in the struggle to break free of imperialist domination can bring together targeted peoples on every continent, regardless of politics, religion, language or culture.

He met with Iranian President Mah moud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad praised Venezuela’s “tangible anti-imperialist” foreign policy. Chávez replied, “Once we are united, we can defeat imperialism. And if we are divided, they will eliminate us.”

Ahmadinejad bestowed on Chávez the country’s most prestigious award, the medal of honor of the Islamic Republic. (Iranian News Agency)

Chávez was accompanied on the trip by his energy minister, Rafael Ramírez. Venezuela is the fifth-largest oil exporter in the world. Its state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is now spending billions of dollars every year on extensive programs to bring literacy, low-cost housing, and free education and health services to the poor.

This alarms the U.S. corporate world. Chávez, writes the Wall Street Journal of Aug. 1, has been “steering the oil company into political, economic and philanthropic ventures that have distracted it from its core business of finding and producing more oil.”

Even more damning in the Journal’s eyes, PDVSA “has turned away from traditional partners like U.S. major Exxon Mobil Corp. and is doing much more business with state companies from Iran, China and India. This weekend, during a visit to Teheran by Mr. Chávez, Iran pledged to invest $4 billion in two Venezuelan oil fields. The two nations also unveiled a raft of joint ventures, including a refinery in Indonesia.”

The $4 billion investment in Venezuela by Iran’s Petropars is its largest outside the country, according to Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh.

Besides cooperating in oil and petrochemicals, the two countries also have signed an agreement for Iran to begin assembling its “Samand” sedan automobile in Venezuela in October.

Shaking off colonial legacy

Like most of the world today, Iran and Venezuela are both developing countries still trying to shake off the legacy of decades of open colonial rule. That period was followed by neocolonialism, when transnational corporations and banks based mostly in the U.S. and Britain exercised control over their valuable petroleum reserves. While supposedly independent, the governments in both countries were run by puppets of foreign oil companies until mass upheavals brought about political change.

The current lopsided world economic order, where imperialist monopolies have sucked out the wealth of resource-rich nations and left them poorer than ever, is now being challenged in country after country.

The imperialists no longer have a monopoly on modern technology, however, despite all their efforts to keep it under wraps. Faced with sanctions, embargoes and all kinds of international arrangements that put the developing world at a disadvantage, countries like Venezuela and Iran are looking to one another, not to the U.S. or Britain, for trade agreements and exchanges of technology that don’t come with a thousand strings attached.

Who has nuclear weapons?

The Bush administration is making a crusade out of attacking Iran for its efforts to develop nuclear power. It was the U.S., of course, that brought the world into the nuclear era more than 60 years ago when it exploded the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M. It then became the first—and only—country to drop these horrible weapons on civilians, when it still had a monopoly on these weapons.

Since then, at least eight more countries have acquired nuclear weapons. Some 31 countries are generating nuclear power, and 56 countries operate nuclear reactors.

For Washington to charge, as it does, that Iran is a danger to the world because it is developing the ability to generate nuclear power is like a pickpocket running through a crowd yelling “Thief! Thief!”

Right now, the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, Israel, is carrying out a war of aggression against neighboring Lebanon. It is acting with the full collaboration of Washington, which has rushed additional missiles to Israel and blocked the UN Security Council from calling for an immediate ceasefire despite the vast humanitarian crisis that Israel’s bombings and invasions have caused.

During his trip to Iran, President Chávez called on third world countries to support Iran’s inalienable right to develop and make peaceful use of nuclear energy.

“Now that the world is faced with the reduction of oil output and the growth of consumerism, it is better to seek alternative energy resources that can be substituted for the fossil fuel,” he told a joint press conference with President Ahmadinejad.

He also denounced Israel for its targeted bombing of the shelter in Qana, Lebanon, where over 60 people, the majority women and children, were killed.

A shameful resolution

The day after Chávez left for Vietnam, the U.S. was able to push through a resolution in the UN Security Council that gives Iran until Aug. 31 to suspend uranium enrichment or face the threat of economic and diplomatic sanctions. Almost immediately, different views about what the resolution meant were voiced by members of the council.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, a hard-liner Bush appointee, called it a “tough resolution” that “demands action.” The Wall Street Journal, however, called it a “weakened” resolution.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak said the resolution does not carry the “automatic” threat of sanctions. “There is no automatic system, but the Security Council could examine further steps to persuade Iran to carry out the recommendations of the IAEA,” Kislyak was quoted by Interfax as saying. “Of course, no one is going to look at any use of force,” he added.

No one?

For months, investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh have been reporting on the Pentagon’s plans to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. With war now raging in Lebanon, Iran is being mentioned as a supporter of the national liberation movement Hezbollah and, by implication, a valid target for Israeli planes and missiles.

Russia and China may have demanded changes be made to the U.S. version before they voted for the resolution, but they should know that the imperialists will use even a “weakened” resolution as justification for further aggression. George W. Bush and then Secretary of State Colin Powell, it should be remembered, pushed the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to say that Iraq was not complying with its inspection demands; they then used the excuse of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” to launch the horrendous shock and awe blitzkrieg of Baghdad.

It turned out that Iraq had no WMDs, of course. Iran has no nuclear weapons. The U.S. has over 10,000 nuclear warheads and is spending billions on perfecting “bunker buster” weapons and an “anti-missile shield.” It should be clear where the danger of high-tech war is coming from.

If the UN were a body that truly represented the world’s people, its resolutions would be demanding the disarming of the imperialists whose wars have killed tens of millions over the past century.

Yet even the extreme military threats from Washington have not been able to hold back the rising tide of mass struggle against imperialism, which has despoiled this planet and impoverished so many of its people. Needed social change will come from the streets, not from the diplomatic compromises of a divided world “community.”