Paxety Pages

The tour of Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just completed is not insignificant. It shows a desire to build bridges between two political radicalisms on the basis of anti-Americanism: the Shiite fundamentalism of the Iranian President and the Bolivarian populism of the Venezuelan head of state. The two flatter themselves by claiming to represent the most radical wing of OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries].

The article says there will be an even more immediate result - plunging Latin America into the Middle East conflicts.  Latin America has generally been able to keep out of the world's major conflicts, even though it has had its share of local conflicts.  Wars between nation states have been rare.

Of course, it was fidel who changed all of this, aligning Cuba with the Soviet Block. That led to almost fifty years of conflict in which local squabbles in Latin America were pushed along by the Cold War. The article goes on to point out that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, things calmed down in Latin America.  fidel, I'll point out, was extremely busy trying make adjustments to keep himself in power.  The article points out that this relative peace (except for the suffering people of Cuba) began to disappear with the rise of Chavez.

But the new Bolivarian messiah exhibits little in the way of democratic values. What he is doing is dragging the region into the worst geopolitical swamp on the planet: the Middle East. To embrace the Iran of the ayatollahs and promote a bringing together of other countries in the area with the regime of Ahmadinejad - who is at the height of his nuclear confrontation with Washington and Europe - can only create tension with the entire Democratic world. But the greatest danger remains a risk of provoking the same tensions between and within South American nations.

The government of Ahmadinejad, which regularly declares that Israel should be wiped off the map and questions the existence of the Holocaust, is using certain Lebanese and Palestinian extremist groups (Hezbullah and Hamas) as instruments of its foreign policy.But nearly all South American countries have large Jewish populations and populations with Syrian-Lebanese origins (Maronites, Sunnis, Shiites) that have always lived in harmony. Consequently, by importing Iranian influence and the problems of the Middle East, Chavez is simply introducing the seeds of discord between these communities and, in the long term, undoubtedly, violence. The more Ahmadinejad is glorified in South America, the more Jewish communities or Christian or Sunni-Lebanese communities or Palestinian communities opposed to Hamas - will feel rejected and threatened. That is to say, the importation of the bloody Middle East conflict to the south of the Americas will not be without consequence on the equilibrium and domestic security of several states in the region.

Of course, fidel has attempted to create his own bloody conflict across Latin America, but was not particularly successful.  chavez may have found an ally who will help him realize fidel's dream.