TOP STORY - 2-11-06

Cuba-Iran-Venezuela axis
Anti-U.S. rumblings, threats from Latin America

Top level

G2 Headlines
Author: Joseph Farah

© 2005 G2 Bulletin
Publishing date: 09.02.2006 18:02
In early January, Cuban official Felipe Perez Roque made a public statement from Tehran. "Cuba supports the Iranian people and government and appreciates the solidarity of [the] Iranian nation with Cuba," he said.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad About the same time, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke with Fidel Castro on the telephone – then later Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. He also reportedly spoke to Evo Morales, the Chavez clone who now leads Bolivia. Later in the month, Chavez joined Cindy Sheehan, the American antiwar activist, to attack President Bush and promised to support her protest against the Iraq war.

''Enough of imperialist aggression,” Chavez said as he hugged Sheehan. “We must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire. We have to bury imperialism this century. Cindy, we are with you in your fight.'' The last conversation took place on Chavez’s nationally broadcast TV show. Sheehan was just the latest American activist to appear on Chavez's Sunday program – a kind of political variety show where he discusses everything from baseball to his life in the army to Venezuelan history and oil prices.

Sheehan said she agreed with Harry Belafonte, the singer and activist, who made headlines by calling President Bush ''the greatest terrorist in the world.'' ''The war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice,'' said Sheehan. Sheehan was in Caracas for the sixth World Social Forum, where nearly 60,000 people met to protest American foreign policy and debate ideas from land reform for the poor to fair trade and indigenous rights.

The American Family Association was so outraged by the spectacle that it has begun a campaign urging U.S. drivers to steer clear of gasoline sold by Citgo Petroleum Corp., the Houston-based U.S. refining and marketing branch of Venezuela's national oil company PDVSA. "It doesn't make sense to purchase gasoline from a country that wants to bring down the U.S. government," said Chairman Donald Wildmon. And, indeed, it appears Chavez is a man of his word – determined to do just that, bring down the U.S. government.

Beyond mere rhetoric, Iran and Venezuela have joined forces in an effort to undermine the U.S. dollar. In October 2005, Chavez announced Venezuela was ready to move the country's foreign-exchange holdings out of the dollar and into the euro. He also called for the creation of a South American central bank designed to hold in euros all the foreign-exchange holdings of the participating countries.

Beginning in 2003, Iran began demanding oil payment in euros, not dollars, although the oil itself was still priced in dollars. Iran has announced the intention of opening an Iranian Oil Bourse in March to challenge NYMEX (the New York Mercantile Exchange) and IPE (London's International Petroleum Exchange). The United States relies on approximately 70 percent of all foreign-exchange currency to be held in dollars because we sell Treasury debt into that foreign-exchange market.

Should Venezuela and Iran succeed in creating a worldwide flight of foreign-exchange reserves away from the dollar and into the euro, the move could depress the value of the dollar, according to Jerome Corsi, author of “Atomic Iran.” “Dwindling foreign exchange dollar holdings could end up pushing the Treasury to sell debt into a smaller international supply of dollars, with the dollar not being as strong as it is today,” he said.

“Increasing the cost of our ‘twin deficits’ – the budget deficit and the trade deficit – would have detrimental effects on the U.S. economy and on a Bush administration, which seems to have lost traditional Republican budgetary discipline.” There are also reasons to believe that Chavez is cozying up to Tehran – and North Korea as well – for more than simple reasons of anti-Americansim. Some intelligence sources believe he, too, is ultimately after the acquisition of nuclear weapons – right in the western hemisphere.

That was the dream of his friend Castro, who lost out on the opportunity in the Cuban Missile crisis. Chavez has also been accused of supporting al-Qaida. Air Force Maj. Juan Diaz Castillo, who was Chavez's pilot, told WorldNetDaily in 2003 that "the American people should awaken and be aware of the enemy they have just three hours' flight from the United States." Diaz said he was part of an operation in which Chavez gave $1 million to al-Qaida for relocation costs, shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

He is one of more than 100 military officers who have quit the Chavez regime as the president tries to hang on to power amid a month-long general strike that has cut off oil exports, his primary source of income. Diaz said in 2003 Chavez was in the process of forming a bloc of Latin American countries that "will promote terrorism and also direct action against the economy of the United States." The leaders of Cuba, Brazil and Ecuador are on board with Chavez, he said, and they "now are aiming at Argentina."

Could the new axis of evil be Venezuela, Iran and Cuba? That’s what some intelligence analysts are saying. Imagine the damage Iranian weapons of mass destruction could do from the proximity of Cuba or Venezuela? While the U.S. has focused its attention on the Middle East, a potentially more explosive development may be occurring right in its own back yard.