By
Kenneth R.
Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com |
December 8, 2006
The unsurprising victory of
Venezuelan song and dance artist Hugo Chavez in his re-election bid
on Sunday was warmly welcomed around the
world.
Chavez friends in Cuba,
Bolivia and Nicaragua were pleased. Castro and Daniel Ortega must
think someone flipped a switch and they’re back in the early
1980s – only this time, there’s no President Reagan and
no Contras.
The Iranian Foreign ministry welcomed the Chavez victory, and didn’t
even threaten to raise oil prices to $200 per barrel. That’s
for next week.
Al Jazeera knew the results even before the votes were cast, and
showed
Chavez with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran
earlier this year, rigged out in orange hard hats, the best of
buddies.
“If the North American empire and its lackeys attempt another
coup, or don't acknowledge the electoral outcome, we will not send
them one more drop of oil," al Jazeera quoted al Jefe as saying.
Oil is mainly what distinguishes Chavez from his mentor, Fidel
Castro. Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter,
and supplies the U.S. with about 11 percent of our daily oil
supplies. And Chavez controls the oil.
Instead of inviting the children to spend their summer holiday
cutting sugar cane, as Fidel did in the 1960s, al Jefe is offering
sugar plums to the poor via his wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary, CITGO,
which controls 6% of all U.S. refining capacity.
In July, Chavez had CITGO break existing distribution agreements with
1,800 independently owned service stations in ten predominantly red
states, because he reportedly
wanted to break contracts
“that benefit U.S. consumers more than Venezuelans.”
Now he is offering to supply discounted heating oil to “the
poor” in several U.S. states as a public relations ploy.
Even
USA Today is asking if
Citgo is no longer an oil company, but a “political tool”
for Chavez.
The Citgo offer of discounted fuel has won support from unexpected
circles. On Friday, the parent company of the conservative
Washington Times will be hosting
Venezeuan ambassador Hernando Alverez Herrera to a “citizens
forum,” where he
will expound on Chavez’s kind and generous offer to supply
discounted fuel to the poor.
As a daily reader of the Times (and a former senior writer for
Insight Magazine, an investigative newsweekly closed by the Times
last year), I was surprised to learn that Herrera would be a featured
speaker at a Washington Times event.
I was even more surprised when the spokesman for the Citizens Forum,
Brian Bauman, told me that he was planning to allow Herrera to speak
unchallenged by any panelist who would focus on Venezuela’s
strategic ties to Iran, a founding member of the axis of evil .“That’s
not the direction of this forum,” he said. “It’s to
speak to the cost of energy in the Washington, DC area. One facet of
that is the Venezuelan program.”
Come hither, Little One, said the Crocodile&
Venezuela under Chavez ressembles Castro’s Cuba in
important ways. Just as Castro did after he seized power, Chavez has
sought to expand his influence throughout the region through covert
action. He bankrolled Ortega’s return to power last month, and
has helped leftist leaders win power in Bolivia and elsewhere.
Also like Castro, he has sought the protection of a powerful opponent
of the United States, in this case the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Castro was powerless to prevent Nikita Krushchev from deploying
nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba, an act that nearly provoked a
nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. And
Kruschhev was no radical Islamic fundamentalist. He was rational to
the extreme, believing in the cold calculus of power politics.
Ahmadinejad has stated publicly that the goal of his government is to
bring about the return of the Imam Mahdi,
the
12th
imam of Shiite Muslim
lore who only comes out of his well after a devastating world
war.
Unlike Krushchev, who understood that he and his regime were doomed
if nuclear missiles actually began to fly, Ahmadinejad believes that
through death, he wins.
It’s hard to deter such a regime.
Iran does not currently have nuclear warheads – at least, so
far as the CIA professes to know. But they do have missiles which, if
deployed in Venezuela, would be capable of hitting the United
States.
But it goes against the pattern of Iranian regime behavior to act so
overtly against the United States. Tehran’s mullahs prefer
acting by indirection, through proxies, just as they are murdering
Americans today in Iraq through proxies.
Suppose for a moment that Iran has acquired a nuclear weapon –
either on the black market, as many sources believe; or through a
clandestine uranium enrichment program, which the CIA discounts
(because they have no spies in Iran who might detect such a
program).
Iran could send a heavily-shielded nuclear warhead to Venezuela,
where it would be fitted to a short-range missile and stowed on board
a U.S.-bound cargo ship.
That cargo ship would not be owned by Iranians or by Venezuelans, but
perhaps by some Qatari millionaire through a front company in the
British Virgin Islands. The deadly ship would then depart Venezuela
carrying perfectly legitimate, declared cargo for the port of Newark,
New Jersey.
Perhaps the ship might not even be bound for the United States at
all, but for Halifax, Nova Scotia, further up the Atlantic seaboard.
Either way, the likelihood it would be inspected on the high seas are
very low.
Steaming along in commercial shipping lanes one hundred miles off the
coast of Washington, DC, the ship’s international crew brings
the missile launcher up from the hold and prepares it for launch.
Under the cover of darkness, they fire their weapon, then stow the
launcher and continue on their way. Two minutes later, Washington, DC
is hit with a fireball that obliterates the White House, the Capitol
Building, and the national monuments in seconds. And no signature
links this act of war back to Iran.
This, of course, is just fiction. But the technology is known and
available. Iran has been testing sea-launched ballistic missiles
since 1998.
Well before any kind of military strike on America, both Iran and
Venezuela are working to get America to surrender, by first admitting
our helplessness.
That is why Chavez is offering discounted oil through Citgo to
Americans. You are poor, you are weak, and your government won’t
take care of you. But we will, if only you will accept our gift.
That is why Iran is trying to get the United States to accept its
help in Iraq, and is working through proxies in America (since it has
no legal equivalent of Citgo) to get its seductive offer across. We
will stop the insurgency, Iran says, if only you will recognize the
legitimacy of our regime, accept our nuclear program, and stop all
efforts to support pro-democracy movements inside Iran. We can keep
Americans from getting killed.
“Come hither, Little One,” said the Crocodile, “and
I’ll whisper.”
In Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the Elephant’s
Child is tempted by his ‘satiable curtiosity’ to seek out
the Crocodile, and cannot believe the beast will actually try to eat
him. As the Elephant’s Child pulls and pulls to free his nose
from the Crocodile’s teeth, it grows and grows – and that
is How the Elephant got its Trunk.
We won’t get off so easily.
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