Getting Serious with the Oil Speculators

Getting Serious with the Oil Speculators
By Thomas McAdams Deford
Since I wrote my column last week  a paean to the advantages of Pres. Bush continuing his slow disappearing act to keep him from further damaging our country’s national security and economy — two writers, both of whom have an unparalleled depth of experience and range of contacts, have given additional ammunition to the concern that the “attack-Iran” option is as frighteningly alive as ever.

Tom Powers, writing in the July 17 edition of the New York Review of Books, explores in detail the fact that the constant, ongoing saber-rattling from the Bush/Cheney camp has so embedded itself in the American consciousness that even Democratic nominee Obama, in the context of Iran’s ambiguous nuclear program, accepts US military action as a possible option.

Secretary of Defense Gates, the sanest of any senior administration official, who is clearly trying to head off the Cheney war party, has observed publicly that “another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.” But he too persists in saying that “the military option must be kept on the table.”

Powers attacks this piece of fraudulent conventional wisdom head on: “Forgive me, but why? The military option is a threat; if the threat is carried out it promises widening war and the possibility of failure on the scale of disaster. Why does a policy of courting disaster have to remain on the table?”

A nuclear-armed Iran would be an “existential threat” to Israel, we are told, a supposition that rests solely on the belief that Iran would actually use the nuclear weapons it may be developing to attack Israel, thereby guaranteeing its own destruction.

But exactly why a country with a 2,500-year history and a culture as rich as China’s would opt for self-immolation is never explained; we are left to take it on faith. Ahmadinejad may talk a nasty game, but he’s not the ultimate power in Iran. And, in any case, have we forgotten that Khrushchev threatened to bury us? But, post-Cuban missile crisis and reeling from that close encounter with Mutual Assured Destruction, the first use of nuclear weapons was indeed off the table, on both sides, despite such subsequent dangerous flashpoints as the 1967 war in the Middle East, the follow-up one six years later, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Vietnam.

Why do we believe it would be otherwise with Iran and Israel? For the past 30 years, as it has tightened its occupation and expanded its settlement of Palestinian lands, Israel has had a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. No doubt it is distressed at the thought that at some point in the future it may have to forego that monopoly. But is that reason enough for the US to willingly acquiesce in an explosion that could turn the Middle East into Armageddon? If, as they make a great pretense about, our Congress is unhappy with oil pushing above $140 a barrel, and the implications it has for the US and the international economy, they might well be weighing the pros and cons of a pre-emptive attack against Iran a little bit more carefully.

If Ahmadinejad sounds threatening, it’s worth recalling that it’s his country, after all, that was on the receiving end of an aggression from Saddam Hussein that killed over a million Iranians and that was tacitly supported by the US. And even before we invaded Iraq — and certainly thereafter — Bush’s designation of Iran as co-evil with North Korea and Saddam would have encouraged any Iranian leader to take notice.

If there were an “existential threat” on the loose, it was surely the one that South Korea was facing as its wild-eyed neighbor to the north actually produced a few nuclear bombs. Seoul, with its population pushing 15 million and less than an hour’s drive from the North Korean border and but a few minutes by bomb-bearing missile, could be obliterated in a blink. And in terms of rational behavior, anyone who would bet on Kim Jong Il over Ahmadinejad doesn’t know their “axis of evil” roster well. Yet, the administration is willing to talk with Kim, albeit a few years and a few bombs too late. Maybe we’ve accepted that North Korea sees nuclear weapons as a deterrent? Or is it that the South Korean right wing doesn’t have the lobbying power the Israelis do?

Sy Hersh’s piece in this week’s New Yorker describes a “major escalation of covert operations” by the US inside Iran, which his Washington sources explain are “designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” Another Washington insider told Hersh the increased activity was aimed at “undermining the government through regime change.”

Is the administration hoping that our covert military actions inside Iran will lead to an Iranian reaction that Bush could then cite, à la 9/11 and Iraq, to attack Iran? Hersh’s article quotes a participant in a meeting earlier this year in which Cheney said openly he was looking for a way “to create a casus belli.”

Haven’t we been down this road before, when the Gulf of Tonkin resolution gave LBJ what he needed to jump-start the Vietnam War? It was only later it turned out that the casus belli, which ultimately led to the death of 55,000 Americans, had been a result of US provocation.

Meanwhile, on the home front, after 30 years of inaction on Capitol Hill — our cars average the same gas mileage as they did in the late ’70s — Congress expresses surprise and outrage over the price of oil.

It’s all the fault of the “speculators,” our elected officials shout. The fact that speculators are the ones who take the risk and provide the liquidity and are in many ways the lifeblood of the capitalist system, which these same elected officials insist the rest of the world must emulate, seems to have escaped their notice.

One thing Congress might do, if it’s so concerned about the high price of oil, is to ask that Bush and Cheney and McCain, and Obama as well, publicly take military action against Iran off the table: you’d see a few of those speculators taking their winnings and heading for the doors. They’re not causing the high prices; they’re only reacting in a rational way to the irrational policies of our government.

http://www.freepressonline.com/article.cfm?id=551