THE
ROVING EYE
The southern axis of evil
By Pepe Escobar
"Hitler" did
New York and was received like, well, the new Adolf Hitler.
Then he flew south and was received like
a revolutionary hero. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
has seen the face of two radically different Americas. Call
it a practical lesson in the new multipolar world order.
After the sparring at Columbia University and his speech at
the United Nations, the Iranian president visited Bolivian
President
Evo Morales in La Paz and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
in Merida. Both countries are rich in natural resources, against
the George W Bush administration's hegemonic designs, and supportive
of the Iranian civilian nuclear program. As such, they are
configured as Iran's key strategic allies in South America.
From the point of view of the Islamic Republic, this is regarded
as nothing short than a key geopolitical victory.
Ahmadinejad arrived in La Paz on a Venezuelan government plane.
Iran and Bolivia swiftly established diplomatic relations and
immediately agreed on a five-year, US$1 billion industrial
cooperation plan, plus a $100 million plan to boost technology
and trade. According to the Bolivians, the Iranians are very
much interested in exploiting lithium and uranium in South
America.
Then Ahmadinejad
flew to Venezuela for a new flurry of bilateral agreements
on joint projects in both countries. The rhetoric
was epic. Ahmadinejad greeted Chavez as "one of the greatest
anti-imperialist fighters". Chavez answered in kind: "An
imperial spokesman tried to disrespect you, calling you a cruel
little tyrant. You responded with the greatness of a revolutionary.
We felt like you were our representative."
Ahmadinejad
and Chavez have already met six times, in both Iran and Venezuela.
Their economic and energy deals - on oil
refineries, petrochemicals, the auto industry - amount to $17
billion, and counting. Iranian diplomats were ecstatic. Chavez'
tacit support for the "peaceful use of nuclear energy" is
considered "very important" - a counterpunch to the
heavy pressure of the US and the European Union. The overwhelming
majority of Latin American governments - including President
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, who has very good relations
with the Bush administration - regard Iran's nuclear program
as a totally legitimate path to generate electricity.
Naturally
the Iran/Venezuela strategic partnership was widely denounced
by the medieval Bolivian landowning oligarchy - which
strictly follows White House cue cards and swears Iran is a
terrorist state that wants a nuclear bomb. And there is nothing
like "revolutionary nations" getting together to
make the US industrial/military complex go nuts - with the
usual ensuing apocalyptic rhetoric of an imminent communist-style "back
yard" cross-border invasion.
This is
especially so when someone like Bolivian Vice President Alvaro
Garcia Linera regards Ahmadinejad's visit as a "political
project". Morales' and Linera's MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo,
the party in power) sees it as consolidating an anti-neo-liberal,
anti-US-hegemony "alternative bloc", even if Bolivia,
Venezuela and Iran do not exactly share the same political
ideology. What they do share is a lot of precious natural resources,
between Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members
Iran and Venezuela, and Bolivia's second-largest gas reserves
in Latin America.
Rafael
Corea in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and eternal
US nemesis Fidel Castro of Cuba also qualify for the "alternative
bloc". On Sunday, Correa, a US-trained socialist economist,
captured a huge victory at the polls, with a new, truly representative
batch of parliamentary members expected to follow the current
corrupt, right-wing-controlled House and perform as a true
constituent assembly.
The big picture
One does not need to be the invaluable Immanuel Wallerstein,
professor emeritus at Yale and director of the Fernand Braudel
Center in New York, to read the writing on the wall. Wallerstein
argues that the Bush administration's endless-war ethos has
not only exposed all the limits of US bombs-and-bullets power
but has also laid bare to the world US political impotence.
This is
the real talk of the town in western Europe, Latin America,
the Middle East, Asia and Africa: US hegemony coming
to an irreversible end, revealing, Wallerstein would say, "multiple
poles of geopolitical power". We are entering "a
situation of structural crisis towards the construction of
a new world system" - with no hegemonic power.
The multiple
poles include the US, western Europe, Russia, China, Japan,
India, South Africa, Iran, Brazil and the southern
cone and, Wallerstein would add, "maybe South America
as a regional bloc".
South America already boasts a powerful regional economic
bloc, Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay as
full members; Venezuela to be ratified soon). Mercosur could
eventually gobble up the Andean Pact nations as well (Bolivia,
Peru, Ecuador, Colombia). Internal tensions are rife - even
if most are now under leftist/progressive governments. But
every actor now knows the name of the game is to push toward
true geopolitical autonomy.
On one side it's possible to follow major steps toward regional
integration - such as Brazil and Venezuela discussing the implementation
of a gigantic southern gas pipeline. On the other side it's
possible to detect familiar seeds of discord - the US doing
all it can to keep Colombia as a client state.
In a recent interview to Venezuelan/American lawyer and essayist
Eva Golinger, US author Noam Chomsky very much put it all in
perspective for those not familiar with the extraordinary egalitarian
push now at work in South America:
For the first time since the Spanish invasion, the countries
are beginning to face some of the internal problems in Latin
America. One of the problems is just disintegration. The countries
have very little relationship to one another. They typically
were related to the outside imperial power, not to each other.
You can even see it in the transportation systems.
But there is also internal disintegration, tremendous inequality,
the worst in the world; small elites and huge [numbers of]
massively impoverished people, and the elites were Europe-oriented
or US-oriented later - that's where their second homes were,
that's where their capital went to, that's where their children
went to school. They didn't have anything to do with the population.
The elites in Latin America had very little responsibility
for the countries. And these two forms of disintegration are
slowly being overcome.
So there is more, there is a pretty close correlation between
wealth and whiteness all over the continent. It's one of the
reasons for the antagonism to Chavez, it's because he doesn't
look white.
Now it's conceded that there is a move to the left, but there
are the good leftists and the bad leftists. The bad leftists
are Chavez and Morales, maybe [Argentine President Nestor]
Kirchner, maybe Correa in Ecuador - they haven't decided yet,
but those are the bad leftists. The good ones are Brazil, maybe
Chile and so on. In order to maintain that picture, it's been
necessary to do some pretty careful control of historical facts.
For example, when Lula the good leftist was re-elected, his
first act was to go to Caracas, where he and Chavez built a
joint bridge over the Orinoco ... it wasn't even reported here
[in the US], because you can't report things like that, it
contradicts the party line - the good guys and the bad guys.
Well, it's not about good guys and bad guys. Most of all it's
about the old, arrogant, corrupt, sub-imperialist order, and
the desire for a more just, equitable, continentally integrated
order. Iran has seen which way the wind is blowing - and it's
rather toward Caracas and La Paz than toward the bright lights,
the big city.
Pepe
Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized
World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007).
He
may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. Its
views are not necessarily those of PETROLEUMWORLD.
