Remember Iran?

Not much has been heard about it lately. The not-so-long-ago urgent issue faded under the blinding media coverage of the campaigns, elections and, of course, the implosion on Wall Street.  The little time devoted to foreign affairs seems to be centered on what to do about Afghanistan.

But John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer last seen wringing his hands over the efficacy of water boarding, says the incoming administration needs to pay prompt attention to "Iran's Latin American Push."

Writing in the Los Angles Times, Kiriakou went beyond the usual singling out of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales as Iran's reputed agents in the hemisphere.

Kiriakou sugggested that Paraguay's new president, Fernando Lugo Mendez, is also palling around with terrorists.

"Then there's Paraguay's new president, Fernando Lugo Mendez, who was lauded in the Iranian media as 'an enemy of the Great Satan' after naming Hezbollah sympathizer and fundraiser Alejandro Hamed Franco as the country's new foreign minister. Hezbollah -- which is Iranian funded and supported -- already has a well-documented presence in Paraguay, and the U.S. State Department has banned the minister from entering the United States or from flying on a U.S. airline."

But former Washington Post and NPR editor John Dinges, who has written three books on Latin America, says Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan, is off the mark.

"The president of Paraguay is a former Catholic bishop and hardly an extreme leftist," says Dinges, now a tenured journalism professor at Columbia University.

"He is applauded all over Latin America as doing for Paraguay what Vicente Fox did for Mexico: break more than a half century of one-party rule in Paraguay.

"I'm not familiar with his foreign minister pick. But have we entered a world in which a country's foreign minister can be branded a Hezbollah sympathizer and on that basis banned from international travel?"

Dinges also said Kiriakou needs to crank back his telescope to get a wider context on Iranian moves in Latin America.

"What is going on is competition for trade and influence in Latin America. Tehran, just as China and others, are taking advantage of the U.S. inattention over the past decade to fill the role of counterweight to the United States that used to be played by the Soviet Union. Countries like Venezuela and Bolivia want alternatives to trade and investment, and Iran is eager to break out of the U.S. quarantine."

 
But Kiriakou, who served as a CIA counter-terrorism official from 1998 through 2004. says the focus needs to remain tightly on Tehran.

"The real danger here doesn't have to do with an arcane diplomatic battle over who has more friends in Latin America," he wrote in the Los Angles Times.

"The problem is visa-free Iranian travel and the potential creation of a terrorist base of operations in the United States' backyard. If anyone with an Iranian passport may enter Bolivia without a visa or any further documentation, the country will soon be open to covert officers of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, its Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which the State Department recently declared a terrorist organization, and the Quds Force, an Iranian military group whose mandate is to spread Islamic revolution around the world."

But here again,  Dinges says Kiriakou needs to take a deep breath.

 "This is a lot of huffing and puffing from a [former] counterterrorism official, in which otherwise benign international activities are portrayed as tantamount to preparations for terrorist acts," he said by e-mail.

"But if you look at the actual activities Iran is engaged in in these countries, it is a stretch to see them as anything but normal diplomatic and economic relations.

"It is an enormous stretch to say that a gas factory in Bolivia together with loosening visa restrictions is setting the stage for Hezbollah terrorism directed from Latin America," he said.

And so it goes. 

At some point in the new administration, I suppose Washington will start paying attention to Latin America again. I suspect President Obama and his national security team will look at the region as a piece of the puzzle they face in the Middle East. 

With Russian bombers making a provocative visit to Venezuela Thursday, it looks like Nicaragua's erstwhile Marxist president, Daniel Ortega, is chomping at the bit to reprise his brief, and disastrous, star role in the cold war three decades ago.

Last week Ortega became the only national leader outside of Moscow to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, invaded by Russian troops in early August.

And the reaction from Washington was swift, if low key.
 
On Wednesday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez cancelled a long-planned visit to Nicaragua, scheduled for later this month, because "circumstances have changed," according to the American ambassador in Managua.

"The secretary's office said that now is not an appropriate moment for the visit because circumstances have changed," U.S. ambassador Robert Callahan told reporters.

Callahan declined to link the cancellation directly to Ortega's recognition of the two Black sea provinces.

But he said, "We have have publicly said regarding ... the Russian occupation of these two entities and the Russian recognition, that this is a violation of some of the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council."

Ortega may also be angling to get Moscow re-involved militarily in Nicaragua, observers said.

As a leader of the Marxist-dominated Sandinistas who took power in 1979, Ortega allied himself with Cuba and the Soviet Union, which supplied him with small arms, Mi-24 combat helicopters and some 2,000 portable ground-to-air SA-7 missiles, called MANPADS.

Ortega recently reneged on an agreement with Washington to destroy the missiles. 

Since he returned to power in 2006, Ortega has also aligned himself with Venezuela's firebrand president Hugo Chavez, who this week welcomed the nonstop arrival of two Russian strategic bombers from across the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. A Russian Navy flotilla has also scheduled a port call in November.
 
Ortega has also irritated Washington by accepting Iran's offer to undertake large-scale infrastructure projects in Nicaragua, the hemisphere's second poorest country after Haiti, but Tehran has yet to show any signs of fulfilling its promises.