Caroline explains how Obama's policy towards Israel and lack of real policy direction has alienated all of South America.....He is bringing the entire world down on the US & Israel.... Replacing Biden with Bill Clinton for Veep will not help.... Avi
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Column One: Why Latin America turned
By CAROLINE B. GLICK, The Jerusalem Post - December 10, 2010
Given the US policy trajectory, it is again obvious that the only one
Israel can rely on to defend its interests is Israel.
Israelis can be excused for wondering why Brazil and Argentina
unexpectedly announced they recognize an independent Palestinian state
with its capital city in Israel’s capital city. Israelis can be
forgiven for being taken by surprise by their move and by the prospect
that Uruguay, and perhaps Paraguay, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and El
Salvador, will be following in their footsteps because the Israeli
media have failed to report on developing trends in Latin America.
And this is not surprising. The media fail to report on almost all the
developing trends impacting the world. For instance, when the Turkish
government sent Hamas supporters to challenge the IDF’s maritime
blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza coastline, the media were
surprised that Israel’s ally Turkey had suddenly become Hamas’s ally
and Israel’s enemy.
Their failure to report on Turkey’s gradual transformation into an
Islamic supremacist state caused the media to treat what was a
culmination of a trend as a shocking new development.
The same is now happening with Latin America.
Whereas in Turkey, the media failed only to report on the significance
of the singular trend of Islamization of Turkish society, the media
have consistently ignored the importance for Israel of three trends
that made Latin America’s embrace of the Palestinians against Israel
eminently predictable.
Those trends are the rise of Hugo Chavez, the regional influence of
the Venezuela-Iran alliance, and the cravenness of US foreign policy
towards Latin America and the Middle East. When viewed as a whole they
explain why Latin American states are lining up to support the
Palestinians.
More importantly, they tell us something about how Israel should be acting.
OVER THE past decade Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has inherited
Fidel Castro’s mantel as the head of the Latin American anti-American
club. He has used Venezuela’s oil wealth, drug money and other illicit
fortunes to draw neighboring states into his orbit and away from the
US. Chavez’s circle of influence now includes Cuba and Nicaragua,
Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador as well as Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina
and Peru. Democracies like Colombia and Chile are also taking steps in
Chavez’s anti-American direction.
Chavez’s choice of Iran is no fluke although it seemed like one to
some when the alliance first arose around 2004. Iran’s footprint in
Latin America has grown gradually. Beginning in the 1980s, Iran
started using Latin America as a forward base of operations against
the US and the West. It deployed Hizbullah and Revolutionary Guards
operatives and other intelligence and terror assets along the largely
ungoverned tri-border area between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.
That staging ground in turn enabled Iran to bomb Israeli and Jewish
targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s.
Iran’s presence on the continent allowed it to take advantage of
Chavez’s consolidation of power. Since taking office in 2005, Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has developed strategic alliances with
Venezuela and Nicaragua.
With Chavez’s assistance, Teheran is expanding its web of alliances
throughout Latin America at the expense of the US and Israel.
On the face of it, Chavez and Ahmadinejad seem like an odd couple. One
is a Marxist and the other is a messianic jihadist. But on closer
inspection it makes perfect sense. They share the same obsessions with
hating the US and loving power.
Chavez has demonstrated his commitment to maintaining power by
crushing his opponents, taking control over the judiciary and media,
amending the constitution and repeatedly stealing elections.
Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks sabotage campaign against the US gave us a
first person account of the magnitude of Ahmadinejad’s electoral
fraud.
In a cable from the US Embassy in Turkmenistan dated 15 June 2009, or
three days after Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian presidential elections,
the embassy reported a conversation with an Iranian source regarding
the true election results. The Iranian source referred to the poll as
a “coup d’etat.”
The regime declared Ahmadinejad the winner with 63% of the vote.
According to the Iranian source, he received less than a tenth of that
amount. As the cable put it, “based on calculations from [opponent Mir
Hossain] Mousavi’s campaign observers who were present at polling
stations around the country and who witnessed the vote counts, Mousavi
received approximately 26 million (or 61%) of the 42 million votes
cast in Friday’s election, followed by Mehdi Karroubi (10-12
million)…. Ahmadinejad received ‘a maximum of 4-5 million votes,’ with
the remainder going to Mohsen Rezai.”
There is no fence-sitting along the Iran-Israel divide. Latin American
countries that embrace Iran always do so to the detriment of their
ties with Israel. Bolivia and Venezuela cut their diplomatic ties with
Israel in January 2009 after siding with Hamas in Operation Cast Lead.
In comments reported on the Hudson New York website, Ricardo Udler,
the president of the small Bolivian Jewish community, said there is a
direct correlation between Bolivia’s growing ties with Iran and its
animosity towards Israel. In his words, “Each time an Iranian official
arrives in Bolivia there are negative comments against the State of
Israel and soon after, the Bolivian authorities issue a communiqué
against the Jewish state.”
Udler also warned that, as he put it, “there is information from
international agencies that indicate that uranium from Bolivia and
Venezuela is being shipped to Iran.”
That was in October. With Iran it appears that if you’re in for an
inch you’re in for a mile. This month we learned that Venezuela and
Iran are jointly deploying intermediate range ballistic missiles in
Venezuela that will be capable of targeting US cities.
THERE IS no doubt that the Venezuelan-Iranian alliance and its growing
force in Latin America go a long way towards explaining South
America’s sudden urge to recognize “Palestine.” But there is more to
the story.
The final trend that the media in Israel have failed to notice is the
impact of US foreign policy in South America and the Middle East alike
has had on the positions of nations like Brazil and Argentina towards
Israel. During the Bush administration, US Latin America policy was an
incoherent bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, the US failed to
assist Chavez’s opponents overthrow him when they had a chance in
2004. The US similarly failed to support Nicaraguan democrats in their
electoral fight against Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in the 2007
elections. On the other hand, the US did foster strong alliances with
Colombia and Chile.
Under the Obama administration, US Latin American policy has become
more straightforward.
The US has turned its back on its allies and is willing to humiliate
itself in pursuit of its adversaries.
In April 2009 US President Barack Obama sat through a 50-minute
anti-American rant by Ortega at the Summit of the Americas. He then
sought out Chavez for a photo-op. In his own address Obama distanced
himself from US history, saying, “We have at times been disengaged,
and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that
we seek an equal partnership.
There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations.”
Unfortunately, Obama’s attempted appeasement hasn’t done any good.
Nicaragua invaded neighboring Costa Rica last month along the San Juan
River. Ortega’s forces are dredging the river as part of an
Iranian-sponsored project to build a canal along the Isthmus of
Nicaragua that will rival the Panama Canal.
Even Obama’s ambassador in Managua admits that Ortega remains deeply
hostile to the US. In a cable from February illicitly published by
WikiLeaks, Ambassador Robert Callahan argued that Ortega’s charm
offensive towards the US was “unlikely to portend a new, friendly
Ortega with whom we can work in the long-term.”
It is not simply the US’s refusal to defend itself against the likes
of Chavez that provokes the likes of Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio
Lula da Silva and Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
to embrace Chavez and Iran.
They are also responding the US’s signals towards Iran and Israel.
Obama’s policy of engaging and sanctioning Iran has no chance of
preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And just like the
Arabs and the Europeans, the South Americans know it. There is no
doubt that at least part of Lula’s reason for signing onto a nuclear
deal with Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s Reccip Erdogan last spring was his
certainty that the US has no intention of preventing Iran from
acquiring nuclear arms.
From Lula’s perspective, there is no reason to participate in the US
charade of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. He might as
well be on the winning side. And since Obama doesn’t mind Iran
winning, Iran will win.
THE SAME rules apply for Israel. Like the Europeans, the Arabs, the
Asians and everyone else, the Latin Americans have clearly noted that
Obama’s only consistent foreign policy goal is his aim of forcing
Israel to accept a hostile Palestinian state and surrender all the
land it took control over in 1967 to the likes of PLO chief Mahmoud
Abbas and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. They see that Obama has
refused to rule out the possibility of recognizing a Palestinian state
even if that state is declared without a peace treaty with Israel.
That is, Obama is unwilling to commit himself to not recognizing a
Palestinian state that will be in a de facto state of war with Israel.
The impression that Obama is completely committed to the Palestinian
cause was reinforced this week rather than weakened with the
cancellation of the Netanyahu-Clinton deal regarding the banning of
Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The deal was to
see Israel banning Jewish construction for an additional 90 days, in
exchange for a US pledge not to ask for any further bans; to support
Israel at the UN Security Council for a limited time against a
Palestinian push to declare independence without peace; and to sell
Israel an additional 20 F-35 fighter jets sometime in the future.
It came apart because Obama was unwilling to put Clinton’s commitments
meager as they are in writing. That is, the deal fell through
because Obama wouldn’t make even a minimal pledge to maintain the US’s
alliance with Israel.
This policy signals to the likes of Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay
that they might as well go with Chavez and Iran and turn their backs
on Israel. No one will thank them if they lag behind the US in their
pro-Iran, anti-Israel policies. And by moving ahead of the US, they
get the credit due to those who stick their fingers in Washington’s
eye.
When we understand the trends that led to Latin America’s hostile act
against Israel, we realize two things. First, while Israel might have
come up with a way to delay the action, it probably couldn’t have
prevented it. And second, given the US policy trajectory, it is again
obvious that the only one Israel can rely on to defend its interests
against Iran and the Palestinians alike is Israel.
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