Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during a meeting. Source: JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]
When in the US, Ahmadinejad always wears the same sneering grin. He wore it when he said Osama bin Laden was hiding in Washington, DC, and when he claimed the Holocaust never happened. The US never liked this grin, and is doing everything it can to wipe that smile off his face. The Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012, which passed both Houses in Washington before the new year, is a piece of congressional legislation declaring that something must be done about Ahmadinejad’s suspicious and increasing presence in the Western Hemisphere. It asserts that a plan will be created by the secretary of state within 180 days of its enactment. During that time, Washington is going to have to justify a lot of suspicions with even fewer facts.
Iran’s relationship with Latin America is no conspiracy theory. Since 2006, pictures of Ahmadinejad shaking hands with anti-imperialistic leaders in the region have been piquing Western intrigue. Venezuelan President Chavez and Ahmadinejad, both presidents of major oil-producing countries, have made it an imperative venture to defend the sovereignty of their oil supply and pricing against the US. Both countries have made USD 5bn of investments in lucrative industrial projects, such as cement factories and dairy production facilities. Chavez helped strengthen Ecuadorian–Iranian relations. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Argentina are benefiting from Iran’s ventures as well. Iran’s relationship with Latin America is industrial, academic, militaristic, and ideological.
The new Act, however, sees this economic relationship as a front for Iranian terrorism. The legislation was introduced to the House three months after two men with Iranian passports attempted to hire a Mexican drug trafficker to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US. FBI Acting Assistant Director Mary Galligan told NBC News, “Mr. Arbabsiar’s [the Mexican trafficker] plea today confirms what our investigation had already uncovered: that he plotted to murder the Saudi Ambassador with members of Iran’s elite Quds Force.” [inset_left]Since 2006, pictures of Ahmadinejad shaking hands with anti-imperialistic leaders in the region have been piquing Western curiosity.[/inset_left] The Quds Force is a unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. After fighting in the Iran–Iraq war, they exported Iran’s Islamic Revolution to other parts of the Middle East by using disenfranchised groups, such as the Kurds and Syrian rebels, as proxies to fight secular leaders. They had been known to operate in Venezuela before the incident.
The ideology behind the Quds Force never seemed to target the US. But link them with Hezbollah, the US’s biggest threat save Al-Qaeda, and there you have an enemy. According to the Act, the US Department of Defense believes that the Quds Force financed Hezbollah, who financed and trained the Argentinian Shi’ites as proxies in the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA). Is Washington playing telephone with itself here, or connecting the dots with ones it drew?
One dot they have to connect these suspicions together is the Lebanese diaspora, (which the Act calls the “Shi’a diaspora” to emphasize that some emigrants were of the same sect as Hezbollah.) The Act is referring to the large influx of Lebanese Shi’ite immigrants who fled to the West since the eighteenth century, largely to Argentina and Venezuela. Shi’ite émigrés drastically increased in number after the Lebanese Civil War. Many of these Shi’ites have kept trade relations with Lebanon. Washington is suspicious that these ‘socioeconomic ties’ have turned aggressively political and created Hezbollah fighting machines.
The 1994 bombing of the AMIA building was the deadliest attack in Argentina’s history, and resembled Hezbollah’s “mega-bomb” style of bombing that was seen when the Azrieli Towers were crumbled in Tel Aviv. Senate and House members say Iran’s seventeen cultural centers and eleven embassies built in Latin America are fronts to recruit, train, and fundraise for plots against the US like the AMIA attack or Arbabsiar’s assassination attempt after it.
When it comes to national security, there is nothing more psychologically damaging than hindsight. The threat of global jihad is relatively new, the US recognizes that it funded and helped create, for example in supplying weapons to the muhajadeen during the Afghan Civil War and its multiple military interventions. But the lens of retrospection is painfully much clearer. The US has been pinching itself over clues it should have spotted long before Al-Qaeda used American weapons against it. And then there is the embarrassing tale of double agent Ali Mohamed, who trained Al-Qaeda recruits in US mosques and community centers while working with the US Special Forces. He was banned from the CIA for telling a mosque believed to be fronted by Hezbollah in Germany that he was an American spy assigned to ‘infiltrate the community.’ It is this kind of clue that the US is trying to act upon before it once again suffers the damage again of its own myopia.
Obama has requested “an outline of the steps his Administration has undertaken to counter Iranian influence in the Western Hemisphere.” Chavez, who believes the US led a failed coup against him in 2002, feels that one day his country will be targeted militarily by the US. He warns against a US invasion of Iran and, says he would stand by his allies. To counter terrorism, the US needs to rectify its seeds through their strategies. Hegemony was one of these seeds they planted, so they must remember a military intervention will only whip the beast they seek to destroy—even if Ahmadinejad continues to wear that grin of his.
