Chávez in Iran
Solidarity and cooperation trump U.S. threats
By
Deirdre Griswold
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.”
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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