Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s intelligence
By Jesús Arboleya Cervera
About to be inaugurated as chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, the Cuban-American representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has made clear what we can expect from her mandate.
A critic of what she considers the “weaknesses” of Obama’s policy toward Latin America, she hosted a meeting of the continental ultraright in the Capitol itself, which was attended by notorious putschists whom she called “our responsible partners.”
She also made statements calling for greater OAS willingness to intervene against governments she deems “threats to democracy, human rights and hemispheric security” and even accused Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega of being a “collaborator with the Castro regime” for his efforts to gain the release of prisoners who had until then allegedly caused sleepless nights to the Congresswoman and her friends.
In fact, this is not new in the Congresswoman’s public life, which has not been characterized precisely by political subtlety. What happens is that it has now become a national product and all Latin Americans, not just Cubans, and all Americans, not just Miamians, will have to suffer her excesses.
Many Cubans perceive these actions as a clear sign of Ileana Ros’ manifest intellectual inability to assume such responsibility in Congress. I even heard an old friend compare her to Benito Remedios, a congressman in Republican Cuba, who reportedly was so stupid that once, angry when his car refused to start, pumped it full of pistol shots.
It is not for me to certify the Congresswoman’s intelligence – as a matter of fact, the IQ of politicians should be made public – and therefore I cannot confirm or deny this comparison. What does seem certain to me is that Ros-Lehtinen is not a rare specimen in the American political fauna.
Currently, among the men who run the United States’ Latin American policy we find the same group that, having weathered the Iran-Contra scandal of the Ronald Reagan era, took over the bureaucratic channels of foreign policy during the administration of W. Bush and continue to act, either within the Obama administration or as a parallel government through the conservative lobby and its contacts with the Pentagon and U.S. espionage services, in which many of them originated.
The Cuban-American ultraright plays a very active role within this group. Proof of the impunity with which they operate is that, by means of the coup in Honduras, they managed to bury the “new beginning” that Obama had proposed for U.S. policy toward Latin America to the point that Lula, one of the new president’s most hopeful supporters, recently said that, lamentably, nothing had changed.
It was not, therefore, a fundamentalist outburst that led Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to travel to Honduras to publicly support Roberto Micheletti when he was unanimously condemned worldwide. Behind her attitude was the U.S. extreme right which, together with the “responsible friends,” including some Cuban-Americans, engineered the coup.
The same could be said of the attempt to appoint Larry Palmer as ambassador to Venezuela, a provocation so gross that anyone could anticipate its rejection by the government of Hugo Chávez, something the ambassador confirmed with his statements. But that’s the whole point: the logic of the right’s purposes is to maintain a climate of constant tension and President Obama is powerless to stop them.
The situation before us is that the more liberal the president is, the less control he has over the individuals who in practice decide the politics of the country. This leaves him with the option to keep quiet, as Obama has done on occasion, or make a fool of himself, something that he has done even more frequently during his tenure.
If the right-wingers have one merit it is their candor. They do not hide what they think and boast of their successes, no matter what means they used to achieve them. They are not really interested in looking different from what they are, because they have no desire to be nice, as expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, himself a Bush leftover in the Obama administration.
Their task is to show results to the power groups they represent and to surround themselves with the hard-core conservatives who constitute their social base, inside and outside the United States.
This strategy kept W. Bush in power for eight years, proving better than anything that intelligence is not a necessary attribute in making U.S. policy. It is also what explains why, in just two years, it was possible to rebuild a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, when it appeared that they were dying as a result of the economic crisis and the failure of the war on terrorism.
Liberal inconsistency is the breeding ground for this recovery. To the extent that disappointed voters distance themselves from the politicians who yesterday vowed to represent them, the right digs its roots and wins elections with the votes of the conservative minority, forever encouraged by new fears and media campaigns where shamelessness has become the norm.
From her new position in Congress, protected by Cuban-American fundamentalists, Zionist Jews and extremist white neocons, Ileana Ros competes for the post of spokeswoman for the ultraright in Latin America, a job that does not seem too demanding, since the Latin American oligarchy apparently is not interested in looking cultured or pleasant.
So, let us not underestimate the lady. If what my friend says is true and Benito Remedios is the benchmark, it might be argued that, following the logic of the former Cuban Congressman, Ileana wins “because she always doubles the offer” and gets back the equivalent.
