Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's friends:
not the sort of people the west likes to do business with

Zimbabweans greet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran on his arrival at Harare airport. He's not made welcome in many world capitals. Photograph: Desmond Kwande/AFP/Getty Images

Ian Black left no stone unturned in search of enemies of the west and friends of Ahmadinejad. The equation is very simple. Leaders of developing countries who happen to be anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-zionist, anti-blood-sucking-predators, are targeted by the very blood-sucking predators. Example: Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Ahamdinejad of Iran, Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Ghaddafi of Libya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, al-Assad of Syria, Mashaal of Palestine. These leaders do feel the need to find comfort in one another's solidarity against a very belligerent and menacing empire. Why did Ian Black attempt to make something that is so straightforward so strange? During the cold-war era, these outcast nations would have found themselves under the protection and umbrella of the USSR. In its absence, there is no other option but to make friends of empire's enemies. Birds of the same feather do flock together.

Ian Black,

Middle East editor guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 22 April 2010

Iran claims to be an emerging new world power. But its president, now visiting Zimbabwe, is welcome in few capitals

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's friends: not the sort of people the west likes to do business withIran claims to be an emerging new world power. But its president, now visiting Zimbabwe, is welcome in few capitals

Zimbabweans greet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran on his arrival at Harare airport. He's not made welcome in many world capitals. Photograph: Desmond Kwande/AFP/Getty Images

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's friends are not all quite as controversial as he is on the world stage but like his host in Harare, Robert Mugabe, few of them are routinely welcome in western capitals.

Elsewhere in Africa the Iranian president has hobnobbed with the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes allegedly committed in Darfur – a charge vehemently denied by Khartoum.

Last year Ahmadinejad is distrusted by the conservative, pro-western Arab states, who worry about him acquiring nuclear weapons. But in March 2008 he became the first Iranian president ever to visit Iraq, which fought a bloody eight-year war against the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. He has also held talks with another neighbour, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul.

His closest ally in the Middle East is Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the strategic relationship between Damascus and Tehran from his father, Hafez, and refuses to bow to US pressure to end it. Last month Ahmadinejad held a summit with Assad and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Hizbullah.

Europe is largely off limits to Ahmadinejad: he attended a UN food security summit in Rome in 2008 but was shunned by Silvio Berlusconi. The previous year he was a guest of President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who is often described as Europe's last dictator and another of the world's most isolated leaders.

Appearances at the UN in New York are the closest he gets to North America, where his anti-Americanism, Holocaust denial and hostility to Israel are deeply disliked.

But he has been most welcome in Latin America. Brazil was his first foreign destination – President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticised attempts to isolate Iran over its nuclear programme.

Ahmadinejad's best friend is Venezuela's Hugo Chávez who has backed Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Chavez and Ahamdinejad have visited each other several times and co-operation between their countries has grown. Both are are oil producers and members of Opec.

Ahmadinejad boasted earlier this month that Iran was emerging as a "new power in the world" which would welcome better relations with any country "except the Zionist regime whose legitimacy has not been recognised."

Ian Black, Middle East editor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 April 2010 19.43 BST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/22/mahmoud-ahmadinejad-iran-zimbabwe-friends