Venezuela & Iran: Whither the Revolutions?

What drives US
foreign policy? Is it primarily the domestic economy, as it logically should
be, or, as many argue, the powerful Israel
lobby, or as other argue, the need to secure energy sources? Of course, the
answer is all three, in varying degrees depending on the geopoltical importance
of the country in question. And woe to any country that threatens any of the
above.

Russia
is perhaps a special case, as US
politics was dependent for so long on the anti-communist Cold War that
ideologues found it impossible to dispense with this useful bugaboo even after
the collapse of Communism. But it was not only Sovietologists like Condoleezza
Rice who perversely prospered from this obsession, but the US domestic economy
itself, which was transformed into what is best described as the
military-industrial complex (MIC). It would take very little to placate today's
Russia -- pull
in NATO's horns and stop pandering to the Russophobes in Eastern
Europe -- but that would hurt the MIC and would hamper the US
plans for empire and oil. So it remains an enemy of choice, though not part of
the Axis of Evil.

This crude
characterisation by Bush/Cheney lumped North Korea,
Iraq and Iran
together as the worst of the worst. With the US
invasion of Iraq,
the current score is one down, two to go. But North
Korea is a red herring. It is merely a very
useful Cold War foil, beloved of the MIC, justifying its many useless, lethal
weapons programmes. A popular whipping boy, a bit of innocent ideological
entertainment.

Without Saddam Hussein
in Iraq, and
ignoring Korea,
we are left with Iran.
But Bush could easily have added Venezuela
to his list, as it is these two countries that pose the greatest real threat to
the US empire.
Both have charismatic leaders who not openly denounce US and Israeli empire but
do something about it. And both have large, nationalised oil sectors. Chavez's
successful defiance of the US
has directly inspired Bolivia,
Ecuador and Paraguay
to elect socialist leaders and given Cuba
a new lease on life. Ahmedinejad has defied the many Israel-imposed bans on
supporting the Palestinian resistance and even publicly questioned the
legitimacy of Israel
itself. These bold and principled men are thereby pariahs, albeit useful ones
for the MIC, along with their Cold War ghost Kim Jong Il.

That is the catch. While
the empire officially frets, the US
military-based economy thrives on its official enemies. It would collapse
without them. This is the supreme irony to be noted by observers of what can
only be described as the bizarre and contradictory world of US
foreign policy.

Venezuela
and Iran are
indeed threats to the US
empire. President Hugo Chavez not only thoroughly nationalised the oil sector
after the crippling strike led by oil executives in 2002-03, but proceeded to
use the revenues to transform his country, putting it on the albeit bumpy road
to socialism -- subsidised basic goods, mass literacy and free health care. He
has even been providing poor Americans with discount gas. "The oil belongs to
all Venezuelans," Chavez emphasised to reporters last month in Argentina,
after the government announced it was taking over oil service companies along
with US-owned gas compression units, adding to the heavy oil projects Venezuela
took over in 2007. Natural gas looks like it will be next. The point of this is
to "regain full petroleum sovereignty," that is, full political sovereignty. No
more attempted colour revolutions for Venezuela.

Which brings us to Iran.
When Mahmoud Ahmedinejad took office in 2005, with the backing of Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he tried to wrest control of key ministries,
especially oil and the government's National Iranian Oil Company (NOIC), from
the Rafsanjani/ Mousavi capitalist elite, replacing officials with his own
choices -- primarily from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It was
not till 2007 that he was able to install his candidate for oil minister, also
head of the NIOC, Gholamhossein Nozari. Like Chavez, he proceeded to use state
oil revenues to consolidate his base among the poor, something which the
so-called reformists under his predecessor Mohammed Khatami or earlier
nonreformists under Rafsanjani/ Mousavi were not noted for.

While Hashemi Rafsanjani
was parliamentary speaker with Mirhossein Mousavi his prime minister in the
1980s, younger Iranians, including Ahmedinejad, were fighting in the IRGC (many
martyring themselves) in the war with Iraq
in the 1980s. Rafsanjani became Iran
's first president in 1989 and added to his family's vast fortune, much of it
connected with oil, during his privatisation programme when he opened the oil
industry to private Iranian contractors. This continued under the "reformist"
Khatami, who took over the presidency in 1997.

Ahmedinejad's ascendancy
in 2005 on a platform to fight and eliminate the "oil mafia" confirmed the IRGC
as the underlying force confronting Rafsanjani and the reformists. Throughout
the 2009 electoral campaign, Ahmedinejad attacked his opponents as leaders of
the corrupt elite, now trying to claw back control.

The elite had had
enough, and the election ruckus last month was their last stand against the
clearly populist, essentially leftist Ahmedinejad (in the West labelled a
"hardliner"). Some pundits call Ahmedinejad's decisive win a coup d'etat by the
IRGC, but the recent demonstrations in Teheran look eerily similar to those in
Caracas in 2002-03 when Venezuelan society was paralysed by its economic elite,
mobilising its own Gucci crowd, strongly backed by the US, protesting a
populist president's determination to use oil revenues to help the common
people. Chavez risked his life in the process, but his careful planning foiled
the plotters and he survived to carry out his agenda. Whether Ahmedinejad can
do the same, and to what extent the IRGC is a vehicle for promoting social
welfare is a drama which is only now unfolding.

The Western media has
uniformly denounced the Iranian elections, with no real evidence, as
fraudulent, much as it denounced the many elections that Chavez had to undergo
in the face of US-inspired strikes and even a military coup, before the
opposition and its US
backers relented. The US
has generously financed Iranian expatriate dissidents and has penetrated
Iranian society with the clear intent to overthrow Ahmedinejad, exactly like
they did in Venezuela,
though it is rarely mentioned in the Western press.

The US
policy of using soft power to undermine unfriendly governments is well known to
both Latin American socialists and Iranian clerics. Khamenei insisted in his
sermon last week that Iran
would not tolerate the green "colour revolution" underway. No wonder that
Ahmedinejad, Chavez and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are such good
friends. They have much in common.

In similar electoral
contests in Latin America between nationalist-populists
and pro-Western liberals, the populists have consistently won in fair
elections, so the results in Iran
should come as no surprise. Past examples include Peron in Argentina
and, most recently, Chavez in Venezuela,
Evo Morales in Bolivia
and Lula da Silva in Brazil,
all of whom have consistently polled 60 per cent or more of the vote in free
elections. The people in these countries prefer social welfare over
unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with military empires.

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