President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner alongside Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman.
Argentina’s foreign policy leaves a lot to be desired
Over the years, Cristina has been the target of a considerable amount
of flak, much of it justified, but not even the allegation that she and
her late husband contrived to get their hands on a few billion stray
dollars or euros has been as damaging as the charge recently hurled at
her by Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman. According to the man who has
been doing his utmost to track down the individuals who planned the
attack on a Jewish community centre in which 85 Argentines died and over
300 others were wounded. Cristina, with the eager assistance of such
unlikely characters as the notorious rabble-rouser Luis D’Elía and
Fernando Esteche, the leader of an extreme right-wing, or, in keeping
with current fashions, left-wing gang called Quebracho, wanted the
bloodthirsty Iranian theocrats to give her some cheap oil in exchange
for her willingness to stop demanding that they hand over the thugs
accused of masterminding the 1994 terrorist atrocity. Though Argentina’s
Congress rubberstamped Cristina’s generous offer, the Iranians lost
interest when it became clear to them that Interpol was not about to
remove the accused, among them the defence minister and a former
president, from its wanted list.
To counter Nisman, loyal Kirchnerites have been doing their best to portray him as a dodgy individual with close ties to the US embassy and some local spies with plenty of grudges, who got what information he might have by illegal means, but, unfortunately for them, for Cristina and for Héctor Timerman, the prosecutor’s version rings true. Even the government did not pretend that its surprising decision to let the ayatollahs off the hook was made on the basis of new evidence that proved Iran had nothing whatever to do with the AMIA bomb attack. Instead, it tried to persuade people that the Iranians were as interested as anyone else in finding out exactly what had happened and would therefore collaborate fully with the Argentine judiciary. It was a bit like proposing that a joint Nazi-Allied “truth commission” be set up to investigate the Holocaust.
For a cold practitioner of Realpolitik, what some are calling a “blood for oil” deal may have made sense a couple of years ago when the price of the black stuff the country desperately needed was going through the roof, but for obvious reasons selling it to the Argentine and international public would have been rather difficult. So too, as it turned out, was making reasonably well-informed people think that the Iranian theocrats would take seriously anything an Argentine jurist might say. As far as the ayatollahs who run Iran are concerned, their own Islamic rules trump all others and, in any case, murdering Jews, even if it does entail some collateral damage, cannot be considered a crime.
Nisman’s unexpected onslaught could hardly have come at a worse time for Cristina. After years of pretending there was nothing to worry about, Europeans are finally waking up to the dangers posed by Islamic militancy and are bracing themselves to confront it, so they will not make life easy for foreign leaders accused of being in cahoots with holy warriors of any kind. Shiite Iran may be at war with Sunnite terrorists like the ones who gunned down the French journalists of Charlie Hebdo and their comrade who killed four Jewish shoppers in a kosher delicatessen, or those who took on the police in Belgium, but nonetheless it is generally assumed that the terrorists who look to Tehran for money, moral support or useful contacts are every bit as bad as those who are fighting for the Islamic Caliphate. In Europe and elsewhere, the climate is changing fast, so Cristina did herself no favours when she allowed herself to be suspected of allying herself with religious fanatics.
Unlike her deceased friend Hugo Chávez, who openly sided with the ayatollahs because they too wanted to bring down the evil Yankee empire, before letting Timerman sign that memorandum with his Iranian counterpart in Addis Ababa Cristina did not seem particularly inclined to cozy up to the archenemies of Israel and the capitalist West, but lately she has become less cautious. In last year’s rambling speech to the UN General Assembly, by casting doubt on the veracity of videos of jihadist beheadings she adopted attitudes that would be more appropriate for a conspiracy theorist lurking in cyberspace than a respectable head of state.
Foreign policy
Cristina found herself in serious difficulties soon after getting re-elected in October 2011. So much money had been squandered in the previous months that she had little choice but to stem the outflow. As support for her ebbed away, she found herself increasingly dependent on a handful of family members and acritical loyalists with what may be described as heterodox opinions about economics, international affairs and much else, people such as D’Elía, a man who boasts of his links with the Iranian regime, and Hebe de Bonafini, a lady who danced with glee when the Twin Towers were destroyed and who, to the French ambassador’s distaste, apparently thinks the Charlie Hebdo caricaturists deserved to die because not that long ago France had done nasty things in Algeria.
Could it be that Argentina’s foreign policy has been outsourced to D’Elía, Bonafini, Esteche and zealots from La Cámpora? If it has been, the next eleven months will be even more interesting than Cristina’s most virulent critics had already expected before Nisman made his move.
Article taken frome here.
To counter Nisman, loyal Kirchnerites have been doing their best to portray him as a dodgy individual with close ties to the US embassy and some local spies with plenty of grudges, who got what information he might have by illegal means, but, unfortunately for them, for Cristina and for Héctor Timerman, the prosecutor’s version rings true. Even the government did not pretend that its surprising decision to let the ayatollahs off the hook was made on the basis of new evidence that proved Iran had nothing whatever to do with the AMIA bomb attack. Instead, it tried to persuade people that the Iranians were as interested as anyone else in finding out exactly what had happened and would therefore collaborate fully with the Argentine judiciary. It was a bit like proposing that a joint Nazi-Allied “truth commission” be set up to investigate the Holocaust.
For a cold practitioner of Realpolitik, what some are calling a “blood for oil” deal may have made sense a couple of years ago when the price of the black stuff the country desperately needed was going through the roof, but for obvious reasons selling it to the Argentine and international public would have been rather difficult. So too, as it turned out, was making reasonably well-informed people think that the Iranian theocrats would take seriously anything an Argentine jurist might say. As far as the ayatollahs who run Iran are concerned, their own Islamic rules trump all others and, in any case, murdering Jews, even if it does entail some collateral damage, cannot be considered a crime.
Nisman’s unexpected onslaught could hardly have come at a worse time for Cristina. After years of pretending there was nothing to worry about, Europeans are finally waking up to the dangers posed by Islamic militancy and are bracing themselves to confront it, so they will not make life easy for foreign leaders accused of being in cahoots with holy warriors of any kind. Shiite Iran may be at war with Sunnite terrorists like the ones who gunned down the French journalists of Charlie Hebdo and their comrade who killed four Jewish shoppers in a kosher delicatessen, or those who took on the police in Belgium, but nonetheless it is generally assumed that the terrorists who look to Tehran for money, moral support or useful contacts are every bit as bad as those who are fighting for the Islamic Caliphate. In Europe and elsewhere, the climate is changing fast, so Cristina did herself no favours when she allowed herself to be suspected of allying herself with religious fanatics.
Unlike her deceased friend Hugo Chávez, who openly sided with the ayatollahs because they too wanted to bring down the evil Yankee empire, before letting Timerman sign that memorandum with his Iranian counterpart in Addis Ababa Cristina did not seem particularly inclined to cozy up to the archenemies of Israel and the capitalist West, but lately she has become less cautious. In last year’s rambling speech to the UN General Assembly, by casting doubt on the veracity of videos of jihadist beheadings she adopted attitudes that would be more appropriate for a conspiracy theorist lurking in cyberspace than a respectable head of state.
Foreign policy
Cristina found herself in serious difficulties soon after getting re-elected in October 2011. So much money had been squandered in the previous months that she had little choice but to stem the outflow. As support for her ebbed away, she found herself increasingly dependent on a handful of family members and acritical loyalists with what may be described as heterodox opinions about economics, international affairs and much else, people such as D’Elía, a man who boasts of his links with the Iranian regime, and Hebe de Bonafini, a lady who danced with glee when the Twin Towers were destroyed and who, to the French ambassador’s distaste, apparently thinks the Charlie Hebdo caricaturists deserved to die because not that long ago France had done nasty things in Algeria.
Could it be that Argentina’s foreign policy has been outsourced to D’Elía, Bonafini, Esteche and zealots from La Cámpora? If it has been, the next eleven months will be even more interesting than Cristina’s most virulent critics had already expected before Nisman made his move.
Article taken frome here.
