No blood for bananas!

So the situation in Honduras is soon to reach a head, when President Mel Zelaya heads back on Saturday with some high-profile backup, whom president-for-now Roberto Micheletti has threatened to arrest. And the U.S. continues to ratchet up the pressure on the new government, most notably by cutting off military aid.

Much of the criticism of the U.S.’s response to the coup in Honduras has centered around the idea that President Obama is abandoning U.S. interests there by going wobbly on a two-bit Hugo Chavez wannabe. To take but one example, see this fellow from the Daily Telegraph who argues that “Barack Obama sells out America and its loyal allies to favour leftists.” But what exactly, are these American “interests” in Honduras?

“The economy relies heavily on a narrow range of exports, notably bananas and coffee,” the CIA Factbook notes. Assuming we’re not that concerned about Chavistas locking up the strategic banana supply, what else is there? There is, of course, a U.S. base that supports counterdrug operations in the region, and Zelaya had recently been criticizing U.S. drug policy.

But really, you can only sense a “threat” from a leftist in Honduras if you subscribe to a Cold War-like domino theory, in which the entire world is composed of “good guys” and “bad guys.” And anyone who is not on “our” side is inherently a threat.

Of course, there are plenty of people who think like that, and I spent an afternoon in the company of many of them earlier this week, at a talk at the Hudson Institute called “Populism, Islamism and ‘Indigenismo’ vs. Democracy in Latin America.” A reporter from the Washington Times was there, too, and wrote up this summary:

UNHOLY ALLIANCE

Anti-American radicals who embrace Islamic extremists as comrades against the West will find themselves victims of their own Muslim allies, if the terrorists ever win the global battle against democracy, a leading Spanish lawmaker and expert on extremism said Tuesday.

“They believe radical Islam is a beautiful black stallion they can ride toward their goal. In fact it is a dragon that will eat them,” said Gustavo de Aristegui, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Popular Party, in a forum at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

Mr. de Aristegui warned against the growing alliance between Islamic extremists and anti-American populists in Latin America and noted that the best example of the trend is the growing cooperation between Iran and Venezuela.

“How can two regimes be so similar when they have so many differences? One drinks rum. The other doesn’t. One has beaches with women in bikinis. The other one has women is chadors,” he said.

Nevertheless, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have formed a cozy friendship in their hatred of the United States, Mr. Aristegui noted.

Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega has also embraced Mr. Ahmadinejad and allowed Iran to open one of its largest embassies in Latin America, Douglas Farah, another panelist, added.

“There are 117 Iranian diplomats in Nicaragua. Most of them are commercial attaches, and there is very little commerce between Nicaragua and Iran,” said Mr. Farah, an investigator with the New York-based anti-terrorist NEFA Foundation.

Commercial attache is frequently a cover for a spy.

Jaime Daremblum, director of Hudson’s Center for Latin American Studies, also warned of the growing influence of Russia and China in the region. Russia recently held military exercises with Venezuela, and China is spreading its leverage through economic investments.

That account leaves out some of the more paranoid elements of de Aristegui’s presentation, in which he not only tied Islamists and Latin American socialists together, but threw in, McCarthy-style, western leftist academics, even going so far as saying he was compiling a “list” of them. “We have a problem within, not only outside,” he said. In his book, he said,”I have tried… to single out some very prominent anti-American Americans.” He added references to “alternative lifestyles” and anti-globalization protesters as all being part of this vast “anti-system alliance.” “They are anti-all religions, except Islamism,” he said, and have “militarized” themselves.

de Aristegui also raised the specter of a Cuban missile crisis scenario, in which Iran would base nuclear missiles in Latin America, to be within striking distance of the U.S. Any evidence that any of the parties involved are at all interested in such a gambit? No, but let’s not let that stop us from some ominous specter-raising!

Now, I think the growing links between Iran and Latin America, Venezuela in particular, are interesting and deserve study. Unfortunately, this event was a good example of how most of the people who talk about these ties employ a lot more hyperbole than facts.

There were, however, at least a coupld of interesting tidbts from Douglas Farah, who has a past as a great international investigative reporter and who is now at the NEFA Foundation.

One is that Hugo Chavez has become a fan of a book by a Spanish academic, Jorge Verstrynge Rojas, called Indirect War and Revolutionary Islam: Origins, Regulations, and Ethics of Asymmetric War. The book apparently discusses how Islamists have been successful at using guerilla/asymmetric warfare against the West, and does so in an approving fashion. This hasn’t gotten quite as much attention as Chavez’s gift of a book to Obama, but it’s certainly intriguing. Farah said Chavez has adopted the book as “doctrine” for the Venezuelan military, and has been encouraging other allied militaries like Bolivia’s to do the same.

Some serious caveats apply, though: First, another researcher, from the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, says merely that Chavez encouraged his officers to read the book, which is a lot different from adopting it as the military’s official doctrine, as Farah implied. Second, aren’t we supposed to be worried about Venezuela buying sophisticated Russian fighter jets? That doesn’t really seem like the move of a military gearing itself up for asymmetric warfare. Finally, liking a book about tactics that Islamists happen to use doesn’t mean that Venezuela and Osama bin Laden are in cahoots any more than U.S. army officers reading Sun Tzu are secretly China sympathizers, or that the popularity of books in China like “The Eight Most Valuable Business Secrets of the Jewish” means that there is a nascent Beijing-Jerusalem axis.

Farah did make one good observation though, which was that despite all of the obvious differences between Iran and Venezuela, one animating idea unites them ideologically: justice. (And, for what it’s worth, that’s also a fundamental principle to the western left.) That’s at odds from the U.S. rhetoric of freedom, and if anything is going to ideologically unite the various rising anti-U.S. powers like Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, that seems likely to be the basis. More on that to come.

In the meantime, this is the upshot: if Zelaya is allowed to take power again, he’s going to let Ahmedinejad base missiles in Honduras. You heard it here first.