Ahmadinejad — Not Nearly Isolated Enough
Coming to a hemisphere near you — Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is embarking on a visit to four countries in Latin America: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador. Asked about this excursion at a Friday press briefing, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Ahmadinejad’s trip is a sign that Iran’s regime is “desperate for friends and flailing around in interesting places to find new friends.”
This inspired a rash of news stories playing up the desperation and isolation of Ahmadinejad & Co., and downplaying any real dangers Tehran’s Latin American hob-nobbing might pose to the U.S. The Associated Press reports, “Ahmadinejad Trip to Latin America a Sign of Desperation.” The New York Times, under a headline calling Ahmadinejad “Increasingly Isolated,” notes that on this trip Ahmadinejad is not visiting such hefty Latin American countries as Brazil, Argentina, Colombia or Mexico.
OK, thanks to a growing roster of sanctions pressed chiefly by the U.S. and EU, Ahmadinejad and his fellow thugs of the Iranian regime may be more isolated than they were a few years ago. But this trip hardly represents isolation and it certainly does not represent, as the State Department put it, “flailing around…to find new friends.” In Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela, Ahmadinejad is visiting old friends. As the New York Times notes, this is his sixth swing through Latin America. He has been making these visits about once a year since he became president of Iran in 2005. Add in the various visits that officials of his Latin hosts have made to Iran, and that’s a lot of hob-nobbing.
Lest anyone is tempted to dismiss Ahmadinejad’s trip as chiefly an exercise in grandstanding and nose-thumbing — which is the tenor of much of the news coverage — let’s recall that almost two years ago, on the eve of retirement, former New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau went out of his way (literally — he stepped off his Manhattan home turf to deliver his message in Washington) to warn that Iran’s growing ties with Venezuela had the makings of the next Cuban missile crisis : “The Iranian nuclear and long-range missile threats and creeping Iranian influence in the Western hemisphere cannot be overlooked,” said Morgenthau.
True, Venezuela’s despotic Hugo Chavez may be ill, and Iran is facing tougher sanctions than a few years ago. But Iran is also closer to producing nuclear weapons, has continued developing missiles to deliver them, and continues to pursue its collision course with the interests and security of the free world — threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz; arming and training terrorists in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond; meddling amid the turmoil in Egypt and Libya; supporting al-Qaeda; and caught last fall allegedly plotting the terrorist act of bombing a Washington restaurant to assassinate the Saudi ambassador.
Whatever difficulties Ahmadinejad might be running into, his brazen trip to Latin America means he is not nearly isolated enough.
I thought I learned in school that we had a president named Monroe who came up with a doctrine that was supposed to prevent this stuff from happening. And the last time we were potentially threatened by missiles from Latin America, a Democratic President (go figure) named Kennedy stopped that from happening. So what has changed since then? Well, presidents like Carter and Obama have come along and literally torn up the Mondroe Doctrine. Remember when Carter was getting alarmed when those Soviet Troops were being stationed on Cuba? Well, with the wolves that inhabit foreign policy, they can smell weakness. Same here with Obama. These same people like Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smell that we have a week president that will not want to stop them simply because he sees foreign policy as a “distraction” rather than as something critical to the defense of this nation. And they will keep smelling it until a new president is voted into office in November of this year.
When it comes to leadership such as exists in a benighted country like Iran, I wouldn’t discount plain stupidity plus the usual suspect of overweening Islamic pride to explain what is going on.
Despite the deaths of Gadaffi, Hussein and Bin Laden, Iran feels some kind of invulnerability. Yet they are the most prominent and anti-American rabble rousers left in the region and seem to little understand they are next on the list and that Americans have left Iraq and soon will leave Afghanistan. There surely must be elements within the U.S. gov’t itching to take down Iran a peg.
Having anti-American murals painted on buildings in Tehran that may be the first to be targeted by American cruise missiles may be an irony entirely lost on medieval fanatics.
If it is true that words kill and that propaganda has killed Americans, then look for violence to be visited on Iran in the near future.
Well, yes… I’m sorry to agree with the “Democrat” Times and the State Department on this, but they are right. None of those countries is significan in the greater scheme of things and are already friendly to Iran. Nothing to see here, really…
It is certainly obvious to everyone that the US government has ignored Chavez
and downplayed the significance of his alliances with other dictatorships
against the US interest.
Actually, it has cost Chavez billions to prove that he can be an irritant to the USA. But, aiding terrorists groups and violating UN sanctions I thought would get more of a reaction from the USA against Chavez, but, they did not.
Not from the press, certainly not from the State Department.
On the one hand, Venezuela is a major oil supplier to USA, on the other hand no ambassador for years now- looks strange to say the least.
The irony of a fundamentalist Islamic regime getting cozy with a bunch of communists is chewy.
It also speaks to how much Ahmadinejad hates us, and how worried we ought to be.
The Marxist-Islamic Alliance is alive and well. Nothing matters more to Marxist extremists like Chavez than fighting Israel. Chavez must necessarily team up with the leader of the most anti-Israel country on earth.
If Kim Jong-un turns out to be less afraid of airplanes than his father was, he may soon be traveling to Iran and Venezuela.
Every year Israel has sent its soldiers across the borders with Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela and annexed more land.
What’s that? Israel doesn’t share any borders with those countries? That may be true on earth, but in heaven the borders do indeed exist, and Israel has been seizing Iranian, Venezuelan, and North Korean territory without mercy.
George:
You raise some good points about the Marxist-Islamic Alliance, but I suspect that the hate in its current form has much deeper roots. Israel’s existence as a successful and thriving secular democratic state, a non-Islamic one, in the Middle East, is the grave offense that threatens the Muslim worldview.
Iran’s leader is the latest person to take on the role of savior to the Muslim world, at least those that subscribe to such thinking. Before him it was Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and before him, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who was instrumental as you know in bringing about the Marxist-Islamic Alliance.
The end goal, of course, is to bring about the destruction of Israel, as horrible as that thought might be. The U.S., as a major force in the Middle East, ought to be concerned with any and all alliances that Iran makes.
No offense to primates, but Ahmadinejad looks a dead ringer for one of those ignorant apes in “Planet of the Apes” who kept trying to kill Charlton Heston.
Time for an Atlantic version of WW 2 Operation Vengeance.
Drop him in the sea.
Ahmadinejad is not isolated, he is probably one of the 10 most popular men on the planet. He is virtually adjunct faculty at Columbia and is welcome in any hotel the pritzker family owns. I would not be surprised if he made a trip to Boston to pick up honorary degrees from Harvard, Brandeis, and Wellesley