By Tad Szulc. Los Angeles
Times. Sunday, December 24, 2000
WASHINGTON--The improbable but fast-growing friendship of three career
military revolutionaries--Fidel Castro of Cuba, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela--poses an urgent challenge to U.S. interests worldwide and
to President-elect George W. Bush. It is a friendship with considerable power:
Venezuela and Iraq are among the top-10 oil exporters in the world, and Cuba is
a beneficiary of their largesse and, in Venezuela's case, a mentor of
revolution.
Meanwhile, United Nations economic sanctions against Iraq, imposed
after the Persian Gulf War nearly 10 years ago, and the four-decade-long U.S.
economic embargo against Cuba, following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, are
crumbling. Allies and U.S. businesses are increasingly violating or ignoring
both embargoes, and there is virtually nothing Washington seems able to do about
it. Earlier this month, the U.N. Security Council overrode U.S. objections and
released $525 million from its Iraqi oil fund for use in upgrading Hussein's oil
industry.
Quintessentially, the Castro-Hussein-Chavez connection is anti-American
and anti-capitalistic, but not in an ideological way. What matters to the three
is domestic power built upon a base of nationalism that they believe legitimizes
their policies.
In a way, this bizarre trio also represents the rebirth, a half century
later, of the kind of nationalist populism spawned by Gen. Juan Peron in
Argentina and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Castro and Hussein gained power
through armed revolutions; Chavez, a paratroopers' lieutenant colonel, was
democratically elected in 1998, after serving time for trying to overthrow the
government in 1992.
Chavez is unquestionably the most intriguing new leader to emerge in
Latin America since Castro--and he is the linchpin between Castro and Hussein.
Although Cuba had been sending doctors and health workers to Iraq for years,
there had not been any major contacts between the two countries until Chavez
appeared on the scene. This fall, Chavez became the first democratically elected
foreign head of state to visit Iraq since the Gulf war, ostensibly to invite
Hussein to a summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. But it
also was an unmistakable in-your-face gesture toward the U.S. Coincidentally or
not, Chavez's helicopter trek to Baghdad from the Iraqi border was followed by
increasing numbers of commercial flights from France, Russia, Jordan and much of
the Middle East.
With France and Russia, two of the five veto-wielding members of the
U.N. Security Council, determined to see the sanctions against Iraq ended, the
United States can do little to prevent them from withering away. Hussein has no
intention of allowing U.N. weapons inspectors back into his country, and he
knows that renewed bombing of Iraq is out of the question. Confident that the
United States and the British would not risk shooting down a civilian airliner
in the southern or northern "no-fly" zone, Hussein has resumed regular
domestic commercial flights for the first time in a decade.
Iraq has the world's second-largest reserves of oil (after Saudi
Arabia), which it exports legally under U.N. controls and smuggles out on a huge
scale. Hussein is not short of cash for whatever adventure next occurs to him,
and in concert with Chavez, he can influence the international oil supply and
its prices.
As for Venezuela, a main source of U.S. imported oil, Chavez has been
raising his profile within OPEC, having presided in Caracas in late September
over the second-ever summit of that organization's heads of state and
governments. A Venezuelan is currently chairman of OPEC. Late in November,
Hussein demonstrated on two occasions what he can do to the oil market when he
briefly threatened to halt the pumping and shipping of oil, a move Chavez knew
about beforehand.
The Iraqi link is one aspect of Chavez's international involvements
that the U.S. must not underestimate, with Cuba playing a central role. Since he
took office in February 1999, Chavez has proclaimed his "identification"
with the Cuban revolution. He visited Havana and entertained Castro in Caracas
for five days last October. Castro treated Chavez as a son, an attitude seldom
displayed by the Cuban leader toward any young people. During that same visit,
Chavez granted Cuba large crude-oil price discounts, as he has done selectively
elsewhere in the Caribbean, and agreed to help complete building a Cuban oil
refinery.
Castro is Chavez's guide in the art of gently and gradually introducing
authoritarian government to Venezuela. Chavez abolished the Senate and
established a unicameral parliament whose members support him. He has a new
constitution, approved by a simple majority of voters in a referendum, that
grants him considerable power.
* * *
To complicate matters and his relations with the United States, Chavez
has been openly supporting leftist guerrilla movements in neighboring Colombia.
The rebels control big swaths of Colombian territory, along with numerous coca
plantations. Last month, Chavez invited two Colombian rebel leaders, including
the daughter of the chief of the principal guerrilla movement, to address the "Latin
American Parliament" held in the national legislative chamber. Washington
has already committed $1.3 billion, mainly in military aid, to the eradication
of both guerrillas and coca plantations.
* * *
This could foreshadow a big U.S. commitment in Colombia and an eventual
conflict with Chavez that may interfere with the flow of oil north from
Venezuela. *
Tad Szulc Visited Iraq and the Rest of the Middle East Earlier This Year. he
Is the Author, Among Other Books, of a Biography of Fidel Castro
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