Can you folks do a sanity check on this article from the Guerilla News Network for me?
Step by step, Iran is being set up for war. What difference does the provocation make? The determination to consolidate the oil reserves in the Caspian Basin was made more than a decade ago and is clearly articulated in the policy papers produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) The Bush administration is one small province away from realizing the its dream of controlling the world’s most valued resource. They won’t let that opportunity pass them by.(Annexing Khuzestan; Battle-Plans for Iran)
Does this make any sense? GNN is making specific, falsifiable predictions, which makes this article interesting even if it is incorrect.
Sounds way off the paranoid deep end. The point to (hypothetically) invading Iran is to prevent it from engaging in nuclear blackmail against its neighbors; as soon as it has a nuclear deterrent, the invasion option closes. This will come at severe pain to all large economies as supplies of Iranian oil are disrupted; we don’t buy from them, but Europe, Japan, China, and India all do, and restricting the supply by that much is going to send the global $/bbl through the roof as demand chases remaining supply. Think $80-$100 per barrel. This is not something to be taken lightly; politicians will be very unpopular as gas (summer) or heating oil (winter) costs rise. It only makes sense to proceed if there is genuine fear.
Invading hostile countries to get their oil supplies isn’t a valid conspiracy theory anymore, what with the spectacular failure to provide actual security to the Iraqi oil sector, and the fact that high oil prices mean that unfriendly regimes just have incentive to keep selling oil to us and laugh all the way to the bank.
My €0.02
Agreed. I know there’s quite a bit of covert CIA stuff going on, but a real invasion is not only unlikely for economic reasons, but completely impossible without instituting a draft. The “volunteer” Army is falling apart as it is.
What is more likerly is people in the Bush Administration are muttering to themselves frustratedly about invading.
An invasion is possible without a draft, but only with a significant coalition. (We theoretically have the force structure needed to fight wars in Iraq and Iran simultaneously, but right now the two war doctrine is really “one war plus always ready to dance in Korea at a week’s notice.”) Do not underestimate the effect of French and/or German boots on the ground; they’re still wary of Bush, but they got pretty seriously burned on the preliminary negotiation phase, and may be looking for an excuse for global projection.
If the Bush Administration is serious about containing Iran (and thanks to Israel and the prospect of regional MAD, they will be,) we might see the spectacle of John Bolton scraping and grovelling to the Security Council (well, the diplomatese version of scraping and grovelling,) begging for help. At that point, expect Putin to revive the Great Game and start with huge power plays; we’re seeing this already, to an extent.
not so fast
One of the, surely foreseen, benefits of TIA and national “RealID” cards is that the Pentagon now has the ability to replace American workers at the drop of a hat to send them to war, and just as easily send illegal immigrants back home when the war is over. They won’t have to worry about doing permanant damage to the US economy by letting in too many illegals, or face too much criticism for using heavy-handed tactics to remove them.
So, not only is the US military failing in its one clear duty: to protect the borders. It’s actively opening the borders whenever necessary to flood the labor market and force US citizens into the military to fight their losing wars.
I’ve seen the petrodollar theory expounded in the article before–one of my econ friends is writing a policy paper involving it. The concept of “war for oil” is simplistic–as plenty of people have pointed out, our occupation of Iraq has not increased our access to actual oil–prices have just risen and risen. The war for control of the oil *market*, on the other hand, is still, in my view, a viable explanation of current US foreign policy.
The article says that oil trade is conducted exclusively in dollars, which artificially props up the dollar’s value. This is true, as far as I know–but it wasn’t a few years ago. A few years before the invasion, Iraq changed its system to break the dollar’s monopoly. They decided to accept either dollars or Euros for oil. There was concern that other OPEC nations would soon follow suit, or even turn exclusively to the Euro. What do you know, Iraq gets invaded. And, funny enough, the first act of the new government was to make the dollar the sole currency accepted for Iraqi oil. What a coincidence.
Now Iran wants to use the Euro alone. Iran has enough clout in the world oil market that this is a reasonable threat to the dollar’s strength, especially if other countries follow suit. From an American perspective, it makes more economic sense to destabilize Iran and stop this chain of events, even at the cost of high oil prices. $100 a barrel is nothing compared to the consequences of the US dollar being worth half its former value.
The real question is not whether the US is willing to invade Iran, but whether the US is *able*. Without a draft, we definitely don’t have the troop numbers to mount a land invasion and maintain order on the ground. Iran is a much stronger nation, militarily, than Saddam’s Iraq was. With the present situation in Iraq what it is, I have doubts we could even control Khuzestan. But, while I’m sure the administration would *like* to have stable, US-controlled oil infrastructure, saving the dollar doesn’t require that. All we *have* to do is destabilize the government–blow shit up, get some CIA action–and that is something that Americans are very good at…