Just my opinion, but as a Venezuelan, I personally think that our alliance with Iran presents very little strategical interest. You may talk about the oil market but, in that sense, we've been allied with Iran for quite a longtime before Chavez, against the Saudi positions within the OPEC. As we all know, the Saudis - western consummers' Trojan Horse in the organization - have since the 70's largely overtaken Venezuela as the main oil exporter in the world. Today, they control around 13% of the world's total oil exports. The KSA being the US-ltd. branch in the region, there's very little to do on that level, besides trying to create internal instability in the kingdom.
But maybe you see other benefits from that alliance that I've overlooked... I'd be curious to hear them if that's the case.
On the other hand, from a moral point of view, I think it's quite deplorable to see our 'leftist revolution' building that kind of brotherhood and alliance with an extreme RW theocracy where emprisonment and torture is the norm for leftist militants. Especially for the "evilous" communist atheists who are treated as a plague that should be eradicated by the Iranian conservatives (like Ahmadinejad).
I may be old fashioned, but I'll never agree with selling leftist comrades (even if they're communists and I'm a socialist*) for temporary geopolitical interests, as Chavez is doing with Iranian progressives. He should speak, he has an influence in Iran nowadays. He should defend what he presents as his ideals and oppose the torture of hundreds of leftist militants at Evin. Unfortunately, he'll never do that, he'll keep calling Ahmadi his "brother" and a "revolutionary freedom fighter". That's a real shame for us.
Ocpagu, if you and I were Iranians and publicly spoke our minds or wrote, trying to convince people of the utility of our ideals (even if they're not exactly the same), we'd be in jail. I can guarantee you that.
* Just in case, by socialist, I don't mean socio-democrat. Anglo-saxons usually reduce the left to a binary confrontation between marxists and SD. That's absurd and shows their lack of a leftist political culture. There are many approaches, from Proudhon's anarchism to Gramsci's historicism and Jaurès effective social fights within the Fench SFIO. However, I tend to disagree with leninism which transformed marxism into an empty frame in which the party-aristocratic-nomenklature flourished and ruled over the workers.
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