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Russia Draws Closer to Venezuela (text & video)
Zaa Nkweta, The Real News via MRZine
Interview with Forrest Hylton
Zaa Nkweta, The Real News: Venezuela just announced that it plans to buy Russian tanks as well as Russian armed reconnaissance vehicles. At the same time, the Russian naval fleet is on its way to Venezuela to conduct joint military exercises. What do you make of this?
Forrest Hylton: On the one hand it’s highly symbolic obviously, because we haven’t seen this type of involvement with anything concerning the Russian military in the Western Hemisphere since the missile crisis under the Kennedy Administration, so it has many people sort of alarmed with the idea that Russia is now some kind of expansionist power, but it has to be understood in the context of the NATO’s effort to basically encircle Russia by incorporating the former satellite republics all along Russia’s borders. Russia is now exerting its own power within the region that has traditionally been considered off limits to any power besides the United States in line with the Monroe Doctrine. So, now, we are looking at a very different situation in which the United States is deeply involved in Eastern Europe and Russia is increasingly involved in Latin America. Of course, Hugo Chavez is looking for allies wherever he can find them in the developing world, China, Russia, Iran, and so forth, in order to decrease Venezuela’s dependence on the United States, both the United States government and the United States economy.
Nkweta: We’ve heard rumblings of pundits talking about a new Cold War. Is this what we are looking at right now? Or is that an overblown simplification of what’s going on?
Hylton: I think it’s reductionist in a lot of ways. On one hand, the United States’ approach to the Western Hemisphere really hasn’t changed that much since the Cold War. Now the rubric is anti-terrorism rather than anti-communism, but we still see the same formula of counter-insurgency wherever US interests are perceived to be threatened. Yet the basic fact of Russia’s incursion into the Western Hemisphere by a military means really comes on the heels of Russia’s incursion, and China’s incursion, into Latin America in terms of trade and investment.
(18 October 2008)
Ahmadinejad slams US for Iraq ‘oil theft’
SBB/AA, Press TV (Iran)
Iran’s president has hinted that the White House is to blame for the billions of dollars that have gone missing in Iraqi oil revenues.
“Several months ago, we heard that an enormous amount of over 100-million barrels of Iraqi crude have gone unaccounted for since the US-led invasion of the country,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday.
The New York Times quoted a draft government report as saying in 2007 that “between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling.”
Considering the four-year period, a total of 100-million barrels of unaccounted crude oil is a conservative estimate.
President Ahmadinejad also questioned the real motives behind the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
According to the Iranian president, Washington has adopted a policy of exploiting the resources of other nations to extricate Americans from the various problems caused by US politicians.
(15 October 2008)
There seems to be a propaganda war going on between the US and Iran, but it’s for me to figure out what the issues are. It doesn’t seem very well thought out, on either side. -BA
U.S. policies may have contributed to Iran revolution, study says
Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times
BEIRUT — A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country’s Islamic Revolution.
A trove of transcripts, memos and other correspondence show sharp differences over rising oil prices developing between the Republican administrations and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the mid-1970s, says a report to be published today in the fall issue of Middle East Journal, an academic journal published by the Washington-based Middle East Institute, a think tank…
…The examination of pre- revolutionary Iran has special relevance today. Cooper said Iran’s economic situation just before the revolution resembled its current state, this time with big-spending President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banking on high oil prices to sustain his power.
“Ahmadinejad’s fiscal recklessness is eerily reminiscent of the shah’s, with Iran’s inflation rate running at approximately 30% and Iran’s current deficit approximately $12 billion — not to mention widespread underemployment and unemployment,” Cooper said in an e-mail…
(17 October 2008)
