Opinion

Bernd Debusmann

Iran ramps up courtship of Latin America

Bernd Debusmann
Dec 30, 2011 09:07 EST
Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton | Iran | Venezuela

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

For decades, American foreign policy on Latin America has gone through cycles of neglect and concern. It’s in a cycle of concern again, prompted by an Iranian campaign to make friends and influence people in the American backyard. Washington’s message to Iran’s Latin friends – don’t get too close – does not appear to impress them.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in unusually strong language, sounded the first warning on December 11: “I think if people want to flirt with Iran, they should take a look at what the consequences might well be for them. And we hope that they will think twice.”

President Barack Obama followed up eight days later with a message focused on Venezuela, Iran beachhead in Latin America. Ties with Iran had not served the interests of Venezuela and its people, he said in an interview with a Venezuelan newspaper. “Sooner or later, Venezuela’s people will have to decide what possible advantage there is in having relations with a country that violates fundamental human rights and is isolated from most of the world.”

Since those warnings, Iran’s Latin American friends have made clear that they are not thinking twice, as Mrs. Clinton suggested. Instead, the leaders of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Ecuador are preparing to play host to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the second week of 2012. In another move to poke the “great Satan”, Iran’s label for the United States, in the eye in its own backyard, Iran launched a Spanish-language satellite TV channel, HispanTV, to break the dominance of international broadcasters that are “muzzled by imperialism, hiding the truth and twisting the facts.” So said Iranian Radio and TV executive Mohamed Sarafraz when he launched the new channel on December 21.

There is more than a little irony in that assertion, given that state-run Iranian media are no strangers to hiding the truth and twisting the facts, not to mention that the government imprisons journalists, jams foreign broadcasts, and engages in Internet censorship. The new Iranian channel aims beyond the countries run by anti-American leaders and is meant to convince Latin Americans of “the ideological legitimacy of our (Iranian) system to the world, ” in the words of Ezzatollah Zarghami, head of Iran’s state radio and TV. That’s easier said than done. Latin Americans dissatisfied with news and information from their own countries can turn to the Internet and to international networks already broadcasting to the region in Spanish — Britain’s BBC, TVE of Spain, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Voice of America and CNN.

Iran’s entry in what Hillary Clinton has called a war of information speaks volumes about Ahmadinejad’s ambition to confront the United States not only in the Middle East but globally. It’s an ambition he shares with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who has portrayed himself as the leader of a global “anti-imperialist” alliance since he came to power 13 years ago.

DELUSIONAL RHETORIC

The two have much in common, from shared hostility to the United States to rhetoric so outrageous it beggars belief. Ahmedinejad has called the holocaust “a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim” and he startled an audience in New York in 2007 by insisting there were no homosexuals in Iran. Chavez is given to elaborate theories involving U.S. assassination plots. After news this week that Argentine President Christina Kirchner had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, Chavez speculated that the United States might have developed a way to give Latin American leaders cancer. He himself underwent cancer surgery in June.

Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, Dilma Roussef of Brazil and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have all battled cancer. Delusional statements aside, Chavez has been the key facilitator for Iran’s attempt to weaken U.S. supremacy in Latin America. Both Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales have declared Iran a “strategic ally” and have signed a slew of joint venture deals. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is a close ally, as are Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Cuba’s Raul Castro. For all of them, Iran’s nuclear program is not an issue: they accept Tehran’s assurances that it is for peaceful purposes.

The United States and its Western allies suspect that Iran is working on nuclear weapons and have imposed successively harsher sanctions to get the theocratic rulers to drop the program. The sanctions, Obama said this month, had succeeded in isolating Iran. They also had an unintended consequence Obama didn’t mention – Iran looking for friends wherever it can find them, from sub-Saharan Africa to America’s backyard. Obama and Clinton have yet to spell out the consequences of flirting with Iran against Washington’s wishes.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

COMMENT
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Jan 1, 2012
4:30 pm EST

Debusmann said “Chavez is given to elaborate theories involving U.S. assassination plots”

What about the US-sponsored “Chamber of Commerce” coup in 2002, when Chavez was taken prisoner? Had there not been a revolt against the coup, Chavez certainly would have been killed.

Sure the guy is bombastic… but delusional? No.

As the US and Israel prepares for war with Iran, there will be no shortage of US bullying any country that opposes the “Project for a New American Century”.

Hopefully first world bankruptcy or depression will prevent another war.

Posted by upstater | Report as abusive

America’s unfulfilled promise to Iraqis

Bernd Debusmann
Dec 16, 2011 11:15 EST
Barack Obama | iraq war

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

When Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency, he spoke eloquently about America‘s moral obligation to Iraqis working for U.S. forces in their country. “We must keep faith with Iraqis who kept faith with us,” he said in a 2007 campaign speech.

“One tragic outcome of this war is that the Iraqis who stand with America – the interpreters, embassy workers and subcontractors – are being targeted for assassination. Keeping this moral obligation is a key part of how we turn the page in Iraq. Because what’s at stake is bigger than the war – it’s our global leadership.”

The war Obama inherited from George W. Bush officially ended this week when U.S. soldiers rolled up the flag of military forces in Iraq in a low-key ceremony attended by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The remaining U.S. soldiers will be out by Dec. 31. They leave behind thousands of the faithful Iraqis Obama described on the campaign trail.

They are still targets, seen by anti-American militants as traitors or collaborators.

A special program set up in 2008 provided for an annual quota of 5,000 visas for Iraqis at risk. Fewer than a quarter have been allotted so far. Thousands of applications are pending, stuck in a “nightmarish, dysfunctional screening process,” in the words of Bob Carey, a resettlement policy expert with the International Rescue Committee. What’s worse, he said in an interview, there is no contingency plan to protect Iraqis at risk after the last American soldier leaves. “Are they being abandoned, betrayed?”

There is a certain symmetry to the beginning and the end of the war. At the beginning, there was little or no planning for the post-combat phase. At the end, there is no post-withdrawal planning to get U.S.-affiliated Iraqis to safety quickly if the need arises. There are precedents for such operations.

In 1996, the administration of Bill Clinton airlifted 6,600 Kurds who were under attack by Saddam Hussein’s army to the Pacific island of Guam, where they went through the asylum process in less than half the time it usually takes.

Just how much risk is there for the estimated 70,000 who worked for the U.S. military, embassy and American sub-contractors? The List Project, an advocacy group set up by Kirk Johnson, a former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has begun compiling a threat spreadsheet. A typical entry, from November 24: “Iraqi who worked with the U.S. contacts TLP, explaining that he had been threatened outside his home by an Iraqi policeman, who told him that he would be beheaded because he was a disloyal traitor and an American puppet.”

A STABLE IRAQ?

A police officer threatening a fellow Iraqi with beheading does not quite fit into the post-U.S. Iraq that Obama described in a speech to troops at Fort Hood to mark the end of the war. The United States, he said, was leaving behind a stable country. How stable it will be remains to be seen. Doubts go beyond refugee advocacy groups and human rights organizations.

In one of the last press briefings by a senior U.S. military officer, Lieutenant General Frank Helmick, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, listed a string of difficulties – Iranian-backed militias, violent extremists, tensions between Sunnis and Shias and between Arabs and Kurds.

One gauge of how stable Iraqis will see their country after the last U.S. soldier leaves will be the rate of return of an estimated 1.6 million who sought refuge in neighboring countries from the sectarian violence uncorked by the U.S. invasion in 2003. Even though violence has subsided substantially from its peak in 2007, there has been no rush of returnees. Neither has there been much change, according to refugee organizations, in the number of internal refugees – people driven from their homes by successive waves of ethnic cleansing in mixed neighborhoods.

Taken together, this makes for more than 3 million people – the largest population displacement in modern Middle East history. It is a consequence of the war barely noticed in the United States. That, too, goes for the number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion. Estimates vary but the lowest figure given by the Iraq Body Count is 104,080 – more than 23 times the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq who are mentioned in virtually every U.S. news story on the war.

Once the last U.S. soldier is out and Iraq fades from the media spotlight, humanitarian workers fear that the already steep uphill battle to focus Western minds on the plight of Iraqi victims of the war will become even more difficult.

As Maxwell Quqa, who runs the Sponsor Iraqi Children Foundation, an organization that helps Iraqi orphans and street children, puts it: “What we face is compassion fatigue.”

COMMENT
See all comments (3) | Add comment
Dec 22, 2011
7:03 pm EST

A War About Nothing ignited by hallucinations of weapons of mass destruction, fueled by ignorance and hatred, and justified in the end by more hallucinations about what a wonderful thing the U.S. did for Iraq by invading and causing the deaths of a hundred thousand or more of its men, women and children.

Posted by politbureau | Report as abusive

Goodbye to the myth of Iran’s “Mad Mullahs”?

Bernd Debusmann
Dec 9, 2011 13:25 EST
Barack Obama | Iran | leon panetta | nuclear weapons

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

After years of portraying Iran’s leaders as irrational actors driven by religious zeal, American neo-conservatives and their Israeli allies appear to be shelving the “mad mullah” argument used to underline the danger of Iran getting nuclear weapons. The mullahs are now seen as shrewd calculators of risk.

The change of tone was reflected in a report on Iran and the bomb by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Washington-based conservative think tank whose hawkish views influenced the decision-making on going to war in Iraq.

The report, published this week, is based on the assumption that sanctions and sabotage will fail and Iran will have a nuclear weapon by the time the next U.S. president takes office in 2013.

And how, according to AEI, has Iran behaved on the road to the nuclear club? “There is a clear pattern … Far from being hothead provocateurs, Iran’s leaders – including both Supreme Leader (Ali) Khamenei and President (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad – often play a shrewd, long game … The nuclear program is a case in point. Each escalation – conversion, enrichment, installation of advanced centrifuges, higher enrichment – has been dribbled out.”

“Iranian leaders have rarely been willing to provoke a crisis merely to shift the ground inexorably toward a particular goal. Nor is this an aberration. Historically, the Islamic Republic has handled trouble well and it has often emerged with its goals achieved at the end of each crisis.” In a passage on Afghanistan, the study notes that “Iran has pursued a pragmatic, cautious policy to exert influence.”

Shrewd, cautious pragmatists? That’s a long way from a string of assertions by American hawks and Israeli leaders that Iran was working on a nuclear bomb with the express purpose of dropping it on Israel, in the full knowledge that doing so would be tantamount to national suicide given Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal and second-strike capability. Irrational behavior taken to extremes.

The loudest warnings have come from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who told a meeting of American Jews in 2006, when he was still leader of the Likud opposition, that ”It’s 1938 (the year before World War II began) and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs (and) is preparing another holocaust for the Jewish people.”

The real concern, as the AEI report makes clear, is not that Iran would attack Israel but that a nuclear-armed Iran would profoundly change the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East. That is “the real prize,” in the words of Thomas Donnelly, one of the authors of the report. It stresses that U.S. national security strategy for the past six decades has rested on the premise that for the United States, the Middle East is a critical region that must not be dominated by a hostile hegemon.

Containing a nuclear Iran the way the United States contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War would be difficult and costly, according to the report, and require more U.S. troops in the region than there are now.

PROBLEM WITHOUT SOLUTION

Aspiring to domination is a perfectly rational aim for Iran, the most populous country in the region (78 million) and achieving that aim has been brought closer by U.S. policies – first by knocking out Iran’s main rival, Iraq, and then by handing over Iraq to a government run by a prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who is much closer to Tehran than to Washington.

How to deny the prize of regional dominance to Iran, with or without nuclear weapons, is a problem whose solution has so far eluded the United States, its western allies and Israel. Ever tightening sanctions for the better part of a quarter century have failed to curb Iran’s ambitions. So has, more recently, a covert campaign of sabotage and assassinations.

How close Iran is to getting a bomb, or the capability to build one at short notice, has long been a matter of dispute between experts. Warnings of an imminent nuclear “breakout” go back to 1984. In the latest round of the nuclear guessing game, the shortest time line is six months, forecast this week by the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

Part of the uncertainty stems from the fact that Iran, which denies working on nuclear weapons, has mimicked the way Israel went about building its own nuclear arsenal in the 1960s, with a mixture of secrecy, denial and ambiguity. It is also uncertain whether there has been a political decision by Ayatollah Khameini to go ahead and make a bomb.

“The United States and the international community are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” President Barack Obama has said repeatedly, calling a nuclear-armed Iran “unacceptable.” That goes along with the assertion that “all options are on the table,” short-hand for a preventive military strike on nuclear installations.

It’s a message that would have more weight if it were not complemented by public comments about the inadvisability of military action. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, for example, laid out in detail this month why he thought that an attack would do no more than set back the nuclear program for a year or two but result in a conflagration that would consume the Middle East.

His reasoning is sound but it results in a mixed signal from Washington. At times, silence is golden.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

COMMENT
See all comments (19) | Add comment
Dec 25, 2011
11:05 pm EST

Debusmann’s definition of sanity is laughable. The Mad Mullahs are “mad”. Is it sane to repeatedly threaten to murder the entire Jewish population of Israel? The President of Iran admits he has had hallucinations telling him the “Mahdi” will return very soon. Reuter’s has clearly shows their anti-Israel bias. All the Jew haters who minimized Iran’s threats in their comments only show their hatred clouds their rationality as does the author. They act as if the very insane President of Iran has never threatened to wipe out the “Zionist” entity. To the Jew haters, threats of genocide are acceptable when they are made against Jews.Iran has murdered innocent Jews in other countries such as Argentina. But it is not 1939 and the Jews will not suffer the same fate which occurred at the hands of the author’s countrymen during WW II. They have their own country, 300-400 nukes and the second best ground forces and Air Force in the world. Albert Einstein told David Ben Gurion Israel must have nuclear weapons and never sign the nuclear non proliferation pact which would eventually result in Israel losing the protection of their nuclear weapons. He knew the Jewish people must always be able to defeat any enemy or face extinction. The comments made here prove him correct.

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