"An
alliance between Chavez and Ahmadinejad would be seen as a threat to both the petroleum
that passes through the Strait of Hormuz and the vast
oil reserves of Venezuela. What benefits might accrue to Venezuela? None! … I
repeat: We have no part in this conflict. Only a deranged mind would hope to
force our country to engage in such atrocity."
Iran President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad listens to a translation of a speech by President Hugo Chavez, welcoming him to, as Chavez likes to say, 'Our America.'
As I write these words, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is arriving in Venezuela. It is incomprehensible that a leader,
who represents the greatest threat to world peace and - why not just say it - to
Venezuela’s interests, is to be welcomed, and in this way involve us in a
conflict that we have nothing to do with.
I refer to only the most
recent confrontation, the type of which frequently erupts in Muslim oil-producing
countries and that threatens the supply of that vital energy source. Such
conflicts always originate in circumstances completely beyond our own
idiosyncrasies and that go back to the very dawn of history. This senseless and
centuries-long shedding of blood has stretched from Exodus to the Holocaust, and includes the assassination
in Karbala in 680 of Hussein,
grandson of the Prophet
Mohammad, which provoked the thousand-year confrontation between Shiites
and Sunnis; the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire in 1918
which destabilized the entire Middle East for all time; and the creation of the
State of Israel by the U.N. in 1947.
Certainly, at the U.N. in 1947,
we voted in favor of the simultaneous creation of a Jewish and a Palestinian state.
It was the Palestinians who failed to accept the decision at the time. A major human
catastrophe developed from then on.
In the midst of a Cold War that was in full
swing between the U.S. and the USSR, each of these situations were great
threats to world peace and created serious problems to a global economy deprived
of oil.
Nevertheless, in each and
every one of these crisis, Venezuela remained neutral according to its
interests. In fact, whenever we could, we boosted our own oil production to
help a world thirsty for oil. Regardless of ideological position and
inconvenience, our foreign policy has always been handled with care. We never meddled
in the affairs of others or threatened anyone - a policy that served to reinforce
our well-earned reputation as the most secure and reliable supplier in the
world.
But in today's Iran, we face a
vicious theocratic dictatorship that has prevailed since the 1979 revolution led
by the Ayatollah Khamenei, whose own people question the legality of the reelection
of President Ahmadinejad. This is a man who incidentally never ceases to repeat
that his country must "wipe Israel off the map" and push forward with
its nuclear plans -peaceful according to him - but whose word the world doubts.
This is an Ahmadinejad who now
confronts a majority of Arab states - save the Syria of Bashar al-Assad, who is
now imposing a bloodbath. It is an Ahmadinejad to whom not only the United
States but Europe has applied ever-more severe sanctions that could now
penalize anyone doing business with the Persian country. And this is an Iran that
threatens to block the Strait of Hormuz, through which more than 18 million barrels
of oil a day pass every day, and which is testing long-range missiles capable
of reaching Israel. This is an Ahmadinejad who could create a conflict more
than capable of producing a Third World War. That is the Iran which our leaders
intend to ever-more tightly embrace.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
An alliance between Chavez and
Ahmadinejad would be seen as a threat to both the petroleum that passes through
the Strait of Hormuz and the vast oil reserves of Venezuela. What benefits
might accrue to Venezuela? None!
I repeat: We have no part in this
conflict. Only a deranged mind would hope to force our country to engage in such
atrocity.
