By Pepe Escobar
"Tom Dispatch"
"Tom Dispatch"
January 17, 2012
Let's start with red lines.
Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the
Iranians,
“Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”
How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat.
Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now,
it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished.
Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon.
The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran
from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not,
in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to
build one someday).
What if, however, there is no “red
line,”
but something completely different?
Call it the petrodollar line.
BANKING
ON SANCTIONS?
Let’s start here: In December 2011, impervious to dire
consequences for the global economy, the U.S. Congress ~ under all the usual
pressures from the Israel lobby (not that it needs them) ~ foisted a mandatory
sanctions package on the Obama administration (100 to 0 in the Senate and with only 12 “no” votes
in the House). Starting in June, the U.S. will have to sanction any
third-country banks and companies dealing with Iran’s Central Bank, which is
meant to cripple that country’s oil sales. (Congress did allow for some
“exemptions.”)
The ultimate target?
Regime change ~ what else? ~ in Tehran.
The proverbial anonymous U.S. official admitted as much in the Washington
Post, and that paper printed the comment. (“The goal of the
U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse, a senior U.S.
intelligence official said, offering the clearest indication yet that the Obama
administration is at least as intent on unseating Iran’s government as it is on
engaging with it.”) But oops! The newspaper then
had to revise the passage to
eliminate that embarrassingly on-target quote. Undoubtedly, this “red line”
came too close to the truth for comfort.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen
believed that only a monster shock-and-awe-style event, totally humiliating the
leadership in Tehran, would lead to genuine regime change ~ and he was hardly
alone. Advocates of actions ranging from air strikes to invasion (whether by
the U.S., Israel, or some combination of the two) have been legion in neocon
Washington. (See, for instance, the Brookings Institution’s 2009 report Which Path to Persia.)
Yet anyone remotely familiar with Iran knows that such an attack
would rally the population behind Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards.
In those circumstances, the deep aversion of many Iranians to the military
dictatorship of the mullahtariat would matter little.
Besides, even the Iranian opposition supports a peaceful nuclear
program. It’s a matter of national pride.
Iranian intellectuals, far more familiar with Persian smoke and
mirrors than ideologues in Washington, totally debunk any war
scenarios. They stress that the Tehran regime, adept in the arts of
Persian shadow play, has no intention of provoking an attack that could lead to
its obliteration.
On their part, whether correctly or not, Tehran strategists
assume that Washington will prove unable to launch yet one more war in the
Greater Middle East, especially one that could lead to staggering collateral
damage for the world economy.
In the meantime, Washington’s expectations that a harsh sanctions
regime might make the Iranians give ground, if not go down, may prove to be a
chimera. Washington spin has been focused on the supposedly disastrous
mega-devaluation of the Iranian currency, the rial, in the face
of the new sanctions.
Unfortunately for the fans of Iranian economic collapse,
Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani has laid out in
elaborate detail the long-term nature of this process, which Iranian economists
have more than welcomed. After all, it will boost Iran’s non-oil exports
and help local industry in competition with cheap Chinese imports. In sum: a
devalued rial stands a reasonable chance of actually reducing unemployment in Iran.
MORE
CONNECTED THAN GOOGLE
Though few in the U.S. have noticed, Iran is not exactly
“isolated,” though Washington might wish it.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani has become a frequent flyer to Tehran.
And he’s a Johnny-come-lately compared to Russia’s national security chief
Nikolai Patrushev, who only recently warned the Israelis not to push the U.S. to
attack Iran.
Add in as well U.S. ally and Afghan President Hamid
Karzai. At a Loya Jirga (grand council) in late 2011, in front of 2,000
tribal leaders, he stressed that Kabul was planning to get even closer to
Tehran.
On that crucial Eurasian chessboard, Pipelineistan, the
Iran-Pakistan (IP) natural gas pipeline ~ much to Washington’s distress ~ is now a go.
Pakistan badly needs energy and its leadership has clearly
decided that it’s unwilling to wait forever and a day for Washington’s eternal pet project ~ the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline ~ to traverse Talibanistan.
Even Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently visited
Tehran, though his country’s relationship with Iran has grown ever
edgier. After all, energy overrules threats in the region.
NATO member Turkey is already involved in covert ops in Syria,
allied with hardcore fundamentalist Sunnis in Iraq, and ~ in a remarkable
volte-face in the wake of the Arab Spring(s) ~ has traded in an
Ankara-Tehran-Damascus axis for an Ankara-Riyadh-Doha one. It is even
planning on hosting components of Washington’s long-planned missile defense
system, targeted at Iran.
All this from a country with a Davutoglu-coined foreign policy
of “zero problems with our neighbors.” Still, the needs of Pipelineistan
do set the heart racing.
Turkey is desperate for access to Iran’s energy resources, and
if Iranian natural gas ever reaches Western Europe ~ something the Europeans
are desperately eager for ~ Turkey will be the privileged transit country.
Turkey’s leaders have already signaled their
rejection of further U.S. sanctions against Iranian oil.
And speaking of connections, last week there was that
spectacular diplomatic coup de théâtre, Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Latin American tour. U.S. right-wingers may
harp on a Tehran-Caracas axis of evil ~ supposedly promoting “terror” across
Latin America as a springboard for future attacks on the northern superpower ~
but back in real life, another kind of truth lurks.
All these years later, Washington is still unable to digest the
idea that it has lost control over, or even influence in, those two regional
powers over which it once exercised unmitigated imperial hegemony.
Add to this the wall of mistrust that has only solidified since
the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Mix in a new, mostly sovereign Latin
America pushing for integration not only via leftwing governments in Venezuela,
Bolivia, and Ecuador but through regional powers Brazil and Argentina.
Stir and you get photo ops like Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez saluting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
Washington continues to push a vision of a world from which Iran has been radically disconnected.State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is typical in saying recently,“Iran can remain in international isolation.”As it happens, though, she needs to get her facts straight.
“Isolated” Iran has $4 billion in joint projects with Venezuela
including, crucially, a bank (as with Ecuador, it has dozens of planned
projects from building power plants to, once again, banking).
That has led the Israel-first crowd in Washington to
vociferously demand that sanctions be slapped on Venezuela. Only problem:
how would the U.S. pay for its crucial Venezuelan oil imports then?
Much was made in the U.S. press of the fact that Ahmadinejad did
not visit Brazil on this jaunt through Latin America, but diplomatically Tehran
and Brasilia remain in sync. When it comes to the nuclear dossier in
particular, Brazil’s history leaves its leaders sympathetic. After all,
that country developed ~ and then dropped ~ a nuclear weapons program.
In May 2010, Brazil and Turkey brokered a uranium-swap agreement
for Iran that might have cleared the decks on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear
imbroglio. It was, however, immediately sabotaged by
Washington.
A key member of the BRICS, the club of top emerging economies, Brasilia
is completely opposed to the U.S. sanctions/embargo strategy.
So Iran may be “isolated” from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM (the 120 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement), it has the majority of the global South on its side. And then, of course, there are those staunch Washington allies, Japan and South Korea, now pleading for exemptions from the coming boycott/embargo of Iran’s Central Bank.
No wonder, because these unilateral U.S. sanctions are also
aimed at Asia. After all, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, together,
buy no less than 62% of Iran’s oil exports.
With trademark Asian politesse, Japan’s Finance Minister Jun
Azumi let Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner know just what a problem
Washington is creating for Tokyo, which relies on Iran for
10% of its oil needs.
It is pledging to at least
modestly “reduce” that share “as soon as possible” in order to get a Washington
exemption from those sanctions, but don’t hold your breath.
South Korea has already announced that it will buy 10% of its
oil needs from Iran in 2012.
SILK
ROAD REDUX
Most important of all, “isolated” Iran happens to be a supreme
matter of national security for China, which has already rejected the latest Washington
sanctions without a blink.
Westerners seem to forget that the Middle Kingdom and Persia have been doing business for almost two millennia. (Does “Silk Road” ring a bell?)
The Chinese have already clinched a juicy deal for the
development of Iran’s largest oil field, Yadavaran. There’s also the matter of
the delivery of Caspian Sea oil from Iran through a pipeline stretching from
Kazakhstan to Western China. In fact, Iran already supplies no less than 15% of
China’s oil and natural gas.
Iran is now more crucial to China,
energy-wise, than the House of Saud is to the U.S., which imports 11% of its
oil from Saudi Arabia.
In fact, China may be the true winner from
Washington’s new sanctions, because it is likely to get its oil and gas at a
lower price as the Iranians grow ever more dependent on the China market.
At this moment, in fact, the two countries are in the middle of
a complex negotiation on the
pricing of Iranian oil, and the Chinese have actually been ratcheting up the
pressure by slightly cutting back on energy purchases. But all this
should be concluded by March, at least two months before the latest round of
U.S. sanctions go into effect, according to experts in Beijing.
In the end, the Chinese will certainly buy much more Iranian gas
than oil, but Iran will still remain its third biggest oil supplier, right
after Saudi Arabia and Angola.
As for other effects of the new sanctions on China, don’t count
on them. Chinese businesses in Iran are building cars, fiber optics
networks, and expanding the Tehran subway. Two-way trade is at $30 billion now
and expected to hit $50 billion in 2015. Chinese businesses will find a
way around the banking problems the new sanctions impose.
Russia is, of course, another key supporter of “isolated”
Iran.
It has opposed stronger sanctions either via the U.N. or through
the Washington-approved package that
targets Iran’s Central Bank. In fact, it favors a rollback of the existing U.N.
sanctions and has also been at work on an alternative plan that could,
at least theoretically, lead to a face-saving nuclear deal for everyone.
On the nuclear front, Tehran has expressed a willingness to compromise with Washington along the lines of the plan Brazil and Turkey suggested and Washington deep-sixed in 2010. Since it is now so much clearer that, for Washington ~ certainly for Congress ~ the nuclear issue is secondary to regime change, any new negotiations are bound to prove excruciatingly painful.
This is especially true now that the leaders of the European
Union have managed to remove themselves from a future negotiating table by
shooting themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet.
In typical fashion, they have meekly followed Washington’s lead
in implementing an Iranian oil embargo. As a senior EU official told National
Iranian American Council President Trita Parsi, and as EU diplomats have
assured me in no uncertain terms, they fear this might prove to be the last
step short of outright war.
Meanwhile, a team of International Atomic Energy Agency
inspectors has just visited Iran.
The IAEA is supervising all things nuclear in Iran, including its new uranium-enrichment plant at Fordow,
near the holy city of Qom, with full production starting in June.
The IAEA is positive: no bomb-making is involved. Nonetheless, Washington (and the Israelis) continue to act as though it’s only a matter of time ~ and not much of it at that.
FOLLOW
THE MONEY
That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns
that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles ~ a similar move to ones
already made in its trade with China and Japan.
As for India, an economic powerhouse in the neighborhood, its
leaders also refuse to stop
buying Iranian oil, a trade that, in the long run, is similarly unlikely to be
conducted in dollars.
India is already using the yuan with China, as Russia and China
have been trading in rubles and yuan for more than a year, as Japan and China
are promoting direct trading in yen and yuan.
As for Iran and China, all new trade and joint investments will
be settled in yuan and rial.
Translation, if any was needed: in the near future, with the Europeans out of the mix, virtually none of Iran’s oil will be traded in dollars.
Moreover, three BRICS members (Russia, India, and China) allied
with Iran are major holders (and producers) of gold. Their complex trade ties
won’t be affected by the whims of a U.S. Congress. In fact, when the
developing world looks at the profound crisis in the
Atlanticist West, what they see is massive U.S. debt, the Fed printing money as
if there’s no tomorrow, lots of “quantitative easing,” and of course the
Eurozone shaking to its very foundations.
Follow the money. Leave aside, for the moment, the new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it’s the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.
It’s been spearheaded by Iran and it’s bound to translate into
an anxious Washington, facing down not only a regional power, but its major
strategic competitors China and Russia. No wonder all those carriers are heading for the
Persian Gulf right now, though it’s the strangest of showdowns ~ a case of
military power being deployed against economic power.
In this context, it’s worth remembering that in September 2000
Saddam Hussein abandoned the petrodollar as the
currency of payment for Iraq’s oil, and moved to the euro.
In March 2003, Iraq was invaded and the inevitable regime change
occurred. Libya’s
Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold dinar both as Africa’s common
currency and as the currency of payment for his country’s energy resources.
Another intervention and another regime change followed.
Washington/NATO/Tel Aviv, however, offers a different
narrative. Iran’s “threats” are at the heart of the present crisis, even
if these are, in fact, that country’s reaction to non-stop US/Israeli covert war and now, of
course, economic war as well.
It’s those “threats,” so the story goes, that are leading to rising oil prices and so fueling the current recession, rather than Wall Street’s casino capitalism or massive U.S. and European debts. The cream of the 1% has nothing against high oil prices, not as long as Iran’s around to be the fall guy for popular anger.
As energy expert Michael Klare pointed out recently,
we are now in a new geo-energy era certain to be extremely turbulent in the
Persian Gulf and elsewhere. But consider 2012 the start-up year as well
for a possibly massive defection from the dollar as the global currency of
choice. As perception is indeed reality, imagine the real world ~ mostly the
global South ~ doing the necessary math and, little by little, beginning to do
business in their own currencies and investing ever less of any surplus in U.S.
Treasury bonds.
Of course, the U.S. can always count on the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) ~ Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab
Emirates ~ which I prefer to call the Gulf Counterrevolution Club (just look at
their performances during the Arab Spring).
For all practical geopolitical purposes, the Gulf monarchies are a U.S. satrapy.
Their decades-old promise to use only the petrodollar translates
into them being an appendage of Pentagon power projection across the Middle
East. Centcom, after all, is based in Qatar; the U.S. Fifth Fleet is
stationed in Bahrain. In fact, in the immensely energy-wealthy lands that we
could label Greater Pipelineistan ~ and that the Pentagon used to call
"the arc of instability" ~ extending through Iran all the way to
Central Asia, the GCC remains key to a dwindling sense of U.S. hegemony.
If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The
Pit and the Pendulum,” Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly
shredding the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Still, it’s the cog that Washington is now focused on.
They have regime change on the brain. All that’s needed is a spark to
start the fire (in ~ one hastens to add ~ all sorts of directions that are
bound to catch Washington off guard).
Remember Operation Northwoods, that 1962
plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terror operations in the
U.S. and blame them on Fidel Castro’s Cuba. (President Kennedy shot the
idea down.)
Or recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, used by President
Lyndon Johnson as a justification for widening the Vietnam War. The U.S.
accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of unprovoked attacks on U.S.
ships. Later, it became clear that one of the attacks had never even
happened and the president had lied about it.
It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore
Full-Spectrum-Dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag
incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to
pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation).
Consider as well the new U.S. military strategy just unveiled by
President Obama in which the focus of Washington’s attention is to move from
two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to
China). Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all
that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the U.S.
Navy.
So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call “Iran” may turn out to be as much about China and the U.S. dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran’s nonexistent bomb. The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?
Pepe
Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia
Times, a TomDispatch regular, and a political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
It's about territoriality and monopolization of the worlds finite resources. At least if they'd just come out and say that instead of selling us ridiculous lies we would know where we stood.
ReplyDeleteAh, but then folks might know what they are talking about and get a clue!
ReplyDeleteBesides, fiction is more palatable to most than the truth.
They figure Jack Nicholson had it right.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
Ahhhh ... dollar hegemony. I've been talking about Iran's threat to this for years.
ReplyDeleteIF Isreal pushes the U.S. into an unwanted war with Iran
ReplyDeleteit will provoke many Anti-Isreali-Semites to devlop within the U.S.
and the so called "special relationship" Isreal has with the U.S. will NEVER be the same!
You got that Bibi?