Anti-communist crows and vultures, and Social Democrat toucans — all clamored against the peaceful negotiation of the conflict over Iran, because it is Lula who led the negotiation, which would further bolster his image. In the event of a failure, even if it leads to a new major military conflict, it could be exploited domestically in electoral terms, helping the opposition in its petty and desperate electoral calculations.
The destiny of the Middle East, of the world, doesn’t matter, provided that Serra may have some hope of getting elected — a candidate who says that Mercosur is a “farce,” that Brazil made “a mess” in Honduras, that the entry of Venezuela in Mercosur is “nonsense,” that “I wouldn’t invite the president of Iran to come to Brazil, nor would I go to Iran.”
World peace be damned, provided that Lula’s candidate won’t continue her ascendency, beating their candidate in the survey of Vox Populi. Peace in the Middle East be damned, provided that they can find some “gaffe” in Lula’s Iran’s trip. The world be damned, provided that the interests of the Brazilian Right are preserved.
This narrow, provincial vision is in open conflict with the importance of the agreement reached in Tehran and its international repercussions, even more so since the agreement contradicts the skepticism of the US government — Hillary mentioned the magnitude of the obstacle that Lula would have to overcome to achieve the agreement and so did the spokespersons for militarization on a world scale. Whereas others failed or betted that it wouldn’t be worth seeking negotiations, Brazil triumphed.
Brazil learned to find allies — Russia, China, Turkey, France — to open a space for political negotiations, which proved possible and correct. The Brazilian position that the United States — and other great powers — in possession of nuclear arsenals do not have a moral right to seek agreements that limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons opens the way for other peace initiatives.
In Israel and Palestine, Lula made it clear that the United States is not a good negotiator for peace in the region, because it is an integral part of the conflict, defining Israel as its strategic ally, as well as because it has failed for a long time, failing to concretize the UN agreement to guarantee the existence of a Palestinian state on the same footing as the Israeli state.
What remains to be done is to launch Lula’s candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize, so that an immense call would spread here, so that this well-deserved international recognition, once and for all, would project Brazil as a new actor in peace negotiations, projecting ourselves as a country that effectively contributes to the task of exiting the unipolar world under the imperial hegemony of the sole superpower and creating a multipolar world.
We should be proud of Brazilian diplomacy and international policy, as conducted by Lula and Celso Amorim. We should fight harder to consolidate these foreign policy directions of Brazil, not only to continue them, but also to extend them and moreover to help build a world in which conflicts will no longer become pretexts for military interventions but will be solved by peaceful political negotiations, in which the rights of all will be respected, especially the rights of those who, till now, have been oppressed by great powers possessing the largest arsenals in the world and seeking to perpetuate their rule of an unjust world order.
The original article “Viva o Brasil! Viva nossa política externa soberana e independente!” was published in the Blog do Emir section of Carta Maior on 17 May 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).
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