Posted on 03/06/2013 by Juan
The foreign policy of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez imagined that
socialism and anti-imperialism are the same thing, and that he could
lead a new sort of socialist international. (He also seems not to have
distinguished between anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism.) These
considerations shaped his Middle East policy in ways that were
contradictory and hypocritical. Chavez, supposedly a man of the people,
stood against Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, against the Libyan Revolution
to overthrow the erratic Muammar Qaddafi, against the Syrian Revolution.
Iran, while it is a profound critic of the United States, is not a
socialist country. Its gini coefficient or measurement of social
inequality now is probably worse than in the days of Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi, the monarch overthrown in 1979. As with all oil states, its
public sector is large, but it also has a lively private sector, which
is dominated by wealthy oligarchs, including some of the ayatollahs and
institutions like the Revolutionary Guards. Iran is a right wing
theocracy, not a left wing socialist state. If Chavez could embrace a
repressive theocracy run for the benefit of wealthy oligarchs, merely
because it is anti-American, then of what logical acrobatics was he
incapable?
Likewise, Chavez’s support for the Ghaddafis in Libya was based on an
extremely superficial reading of Libyan political, economic and social
system. The Ghaddafi family looted the country of its wealth, wasting it
on ruinous African adventures or squirreling it away in Western banks
and real estate. Libya was not a socialist country but a post-Soviet,
Russian-style oligarchy. Ordinary Libyans, especially in the east of the
country, were increasingly cut out of any share in the country’s oil
bonanza. I was shocked last year on my visit there how dowdy and
relatively undeveloped Benghazi is; Ghaddafi had clearly punished the
country’s second largest city by declining to spend much money on it.
Nor was Ghaddafi of 2010 even particularly anti-imperialist. He had
welcomed European investment in his oil and gas industries and had much
improved relations with the Bush administration. Far from being
anti-American, Ghaddafi had a thing for Condi Rice and called Barack
Obama his African son. Chavez’s own ally, Iran, largely supported the
struggle of the Libyan people against what one ayatollah called “this
shell-shocked individual,” though of course Iran condemned the NATO air
intervention.
Syria is also no longer a socialist country. The relatives and
hangers-on of the ruling al-Assad family transformed themselves into
billionaires, using their government contacts to gain lucrative
contracts and establishing monopolies. Working Syrians were facing
declining real wages in the past decade and very high youth
unemployment. Poverty was increasing. Nor was Syria particularly
anti-imperialist. In the 1970s and 1980s in Lebanon, Baathist Syria had
gladly helped defeat the Palestine Liberation Organization and its Druze
and Muslim allies on behalf of the pro-American, right wing Phalangist
Party supported by some Christians. After 9/11, the Syrian government
tortured al-Qaeda suspects for the Bush administration. It was the US
congress that cut Syria off in 2003, not the other way around. And when
Obama reopened the US embassy and sought better ties in 2009, al-Assad
was perfectly happy to accept.
Whatever one thought of Chavez, he did genuinely improve the lot of the
Venezuelan working classes. He won elections and was genuinely popular
for this reason. He appears not to have been able to imagine that
Khamenei, Ghaddafi and al-Assad are rather less interested in an ideal
like the public welfare.
Unable to perform a basic political-economy analysis that would
demonstrate that Iran, Libya and Syria had abandoned whatever socialist
commitments they once had (Iran of the ayatollahs had never been
progressive), Chavez in his own mind appears to have thought that they
were analogous to the Bolivia of Eva Morales or the Ecuador of Rafael
Correa. Emphatically not so.
He also imagined these countries as anti-American (only Iran really is),
and appears to have believed that such a stance covers a multitude of
sins on the part of their elites– looting the country, feathering their
own nests, and authoritarian dictatorship and police states that deploy
arbitrary arrest and torture. In the case of Libya and Syria, the
regimes showed a willingness to massacre thousands of their own citizens
with bombings from the air and heavy artillery and tank barrages fired
into civilian neighborhoods. US imperialism has been guilty of great
crimes in Central America and often backed right wing dictators in Latin
America generally. You understand how it made a bad impression on
Chavez. But the US supported Algeria and many other decolonizing
countries in the 1960s and “imperialism” is a thin reed as an
all-encompassing analytical tool. There is a sense in which capitalist
Russia is seeking a superpower supremacy in parts of the Middle East.
Chavez was happy to align with that development.
Venezuela’s stances on the Middle East under Chavez were not usually
important in any practical sense. Despite a lot of verbiage, its
economic cooperation with Iran has been minor for both countries, and
Chavez did no more than make angry speeches about Libya and Syria. Good
Iranian-Venezuelan relations provoked a great deal of hysteria in the
US, but they don’t actually appear to have been consequential, either in
the sphere of economics or in that of security. Despite dark predictions
by US hawks, it is probably not very important whether Venezuela keeps
its current foreign policy or alters it.
But Chavez did sully his legacy as a progressive with his superficial
reading of what ‘anti-imperialism’ entails and his inability to see the
neo-liberal police states of the Middle East for what they had become.