Coming to a Neighborhood Near You: The Axis of Evil

[Ryan Ruck]

Coming to a Neighborhood Near You: The Axis of Evil

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 Venezuelan 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 resembles 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 Khrushchev from deploying nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba, an act that nearly provoked a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. And Khrushchev 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 Khrushchev, 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 curiosity’ 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.

[vector7]

Red Dawn Alert: Nicaragua’s Cuban-trained army commander in Havana to revitalize Cold War-era military relations, Aviles’ first official visit to Cuba since Ortega’s return to presidency; ALBA states est. armed forces school in Bolivia earlier this year

2 Comments
Posted by periloustimes1 on September 10, 2011

-

Moscow Begins to Quietly Rebuild Nicaraguan Military, Sends US$26.5 Million to Equip “Rescue Brigade,” Build Hospitals

We have decided on a plan of covert actions, etc. to block the Cuban aid to Nicaragua & El Salvador. There is no question but that all of Central Am.[erica] is targeted for a Communist takeover.

– US President Ronald Reagan, entry for November 16, 1981, The Reagan Diaries (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007)

Pictured above: Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega (left) salutes next to Commander in Chief of the Army of Nicaragua, General Julio Cesar Aviles, during a military parade commemorating the 32nd anniversary of the founding of the Nicaraguan army, on Simon Bolivar Avenue in Managua, on September 3, 2011.

In a sign of the revitalized friendship between Managua and Havana, Nicaragua’s top general, Sandinista Julio Cesar Aviles, has traveled to Cuba to promote bilateral military cooperation that was severed in 1990, after President Daniel Ortega lost to US-backed candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and her 14-party opposition coalition. Ortega returned to the presidency in January 2007 on the basis of a meager 38% of the popular vote, one of the provisos of a sordid pact with Constitutionalist Liberal Party leader Arnoldo Aleman.

In Havana, ex-guerrilla Aviles thanked Cuba for the support the island communist state historically offered his Central American country, especially in the military and health sectors. “We came to strengthen these historical bonds of friendship and cooperation between our armed forces,” Aviles told reporters after laying a wreath on the tomb of Cuban independence hero, General Antonio Maceo, at the Cacahual Mausoleum.

“You supported us to make Nicaragua a free country, helped us in all areas and continue to help”, said Aviles, who extended the good wishes of President Ortega for the Cuban people. “Cuban doctors have provided medical care to thousands of Nicaraguans living in remote areas of our country,” remarked Aviles. “I am happy and pleased to be here”, Aviles said, recalling his years as a student at the General Jose Maceo Inter-Arms Academy of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), one of the sites he will visit during his stay until September 16. Aviles will also visit FAR military units, higher education institutions, and historical sites.

With training from the Soviet KGB and pep talks from Fidel Castro, Ortega, brother Humberto and Maoist Tomas Borge led the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to victory over the Somoza dynasty in 1979. In 2006, Lloyd Billingsley, citing Vasili Mitrokhin’s The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, writes:

Under the same ISKRA codename, the KGB also trained the Nicaraguan guerrillas who seized the National Congress in August 1978. Vladimir Kryuchkov head of the FCD, the KGB’s foreign intelligence directorate, was briefed on operations. The guerrillas flew to Havana, where Castro met with Tomas Borge, Humberto Ortega and Daniel Ortega. Cuba’s Departamento America (DA) helped them set up a base in Costa Rica, vital in their ousting of strongman Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

After the communist takeover of Nicaragua, Soviet, Eastern European, and Cuban advisors flocked to Central America’s new “Red Mecca.” According to a 1987 report published by the Los Angeles Times:

The leftist Sandinista regime last year conceded that 800 Cuban military personnel were in Nicaragua. However, Reagan Administration officials believed their number to be as much as three times higher. The military advisers were in addition to about 2,500 Cuban civilians who serve as teachers, health workers and technical advisers.

In spite of the “collapse of communism” in Eastern Europe 20 years ago, the neo-Sandinista regime’s ideological continuity with its own past has not changed. This past week, governments and individuals in solidarity with Cuba conveyed their sympathies over the recent death of Cuba’s defense minister, General Julio Casas Regueiro, one of the island’s communist “old guards.”

In Managua, a much older Borge attended a memorial for Regueiro at the Cuban embassy at the request of Ortega. Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency referred to Borge as “Commander of the Revolution,” referring, of course, to the 1979 uprising in Nicaragua. During the 1980s, Borge was Nicaragua’s feared interior minister. Since 2007, he has been Nicaragua’s ambassador to Peru. The book of condolences was also signed by leaders of the ruling FSLN, Sandinista deputies of Nicaragua’s National Assembly, and Nicaraguan legislators of the Central American Parliament.

The communist regimes in the People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Laos hastened to send their sympathies over Regeiro’s death. The Secretary General of El Salvador’s ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, Medardo Gonzalez, dispatched his condolences to Cuban President Raul Castro.

Bolivian Defense Minister Maria Cecilia Chacon expressed her “deepest sympathies” and signed the book of condolences open at the Cuban embassy in La Paz. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, is a self-avowed “Marxist-Leninist.” Like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, Bolivia is a member of the eight-nation Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and, since earlier this year, has hosted a military school tasked with indoctrinating member armed forces in neo-Marxism and pan-Latin Americanism.

Incidentally, the ALBA states are united in their support for deposed Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, who is also a long-time personal friend of Ortega. This week, Venezuela’s foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, protested: “The NTC is part of a brutal and criminal foreign occupation and intervention and of a war that has been imposed on the people of Libya.”

Russia has also revitalized its relationship with Ortega, sending US$26.5 million to the Nicaraguan military, ostensibly to form a “rescue brigade” and build two hospitals for victims of natural disasters. However, this news was only reported in the Spanish-language media, so most citizens of the “shopping mall regime” will remain in the dark.

[American Patriot]

Ah... the Sandinista... my old enemies....