Sunday, February 12, 2006

More nonsense Iran talk

A common theory is that the upcoming attack on Iran is due to Iran's plan to establish an oil bourse to trade oil in Euros. Paul Craig Roberts neatly rebuts this theory. Any American geopolitical thinkers worried about the value of the American dollar would be worried about keeping the dollar as the world reserve currency, and the cost of an attack on Iran, a cost which would be enormous (in total, probably five to ten times the one or two trillion the Iraq war will cost) and would all have to be borrowed, would do much more to finish the American dollar as a reserve currency than any oil bourse would. The bourse might have a small effect, as countries which need to buy oil might find it handier to keep more of their reserve currencies in Euros, but the overall status of the American dollar is much more dependent on the continued general financial health of the United States. American planners may very well be looking to the bourse as an excuse to gently deflate the overly high value of the dollar.

Anyone who tells you that the war on Iran can just be accomplished with bombing raids is lying because:

  1. American troops would have to go in to secure the oil fields, which would lead to a ground war and an eventual insurgency even stronger than the Americans face in Iraq; and

  2. the Iranian leadership would retaliate by releasing the hounds of insurgency in Iraq (if you think it is bad now, with Iranian cooperation in place to keep things relatively calm, just wait until Iran decides to stir things up!).

Nuclear bombs aren't an option as the Americans need to keep the place habitable for American oil engineers, and the loss of world Iranian oil production simply isn't possible. I remain completely convinced that the talk about the war in Iran is just talk, and Syria is the real target in danger. Scott Ritter thinks that war on Iran is inevitable because John Bolton's speechwriter told him that the speech setting it up has already been written. Think about it. If this is true, would Bolton's speechwriter have told Ritter about it? Isn't it just an obvious trick to fool Ritter into thinking that the target is Iran? The United States isn't going to attack Israel's only possible friend in the Middle East. Besides hiding real American intentions, and keeping the Iranian leadership as radical as possible (moderate Iranian leaders would be a disaster for Israel), the Iran talk helps maintain a high world oil price (gotta keep those Exxon profits up near forty billion a year!).