Greenbacked-up as hell and not taking it anymore

Roll out red carpets
Here come the China boys
-- The Payola$ (1979)

A report by Robert Fisk (the only Western journalist to ever interview Osama bin Laden) in today's Independent augurs ill for the continuance of the United States' dominance of world finance - perhaps a body blow to a crumbling empire:

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Well that tidbit of truth is a wee bit disturbing.

No Washington Bullets in Iran please

For the very first time ever,
When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,
There was no interference from America
Human rights in America

Well the people fought the leader,
And up he flew...
With no Washington bullets what else could he do?
--The Clash, from Washington Bullets

As usual, historian Juan Cole has an excellent round-up of the latest news from Iran, taking care to attribute his sources, and contextualizing them with his knowledge of the underlying politics. In Cole's words:

Mousavi has thrown down a gauntlet before the Supreme Leader and a battle has been joined. By the rules of the Khomeinist regime, only one of them can now survive. And perhaps neither will.

It doesn't seem like that long ago that Bush's United States was perilously close to invading Iran. Thank goodness this never came to pass. Obama's low-key reaction thus far seems appropriate to me. Let the Iranians find their way on their own and avoid the impression of Washington Bullets dictating the outcome. Because then any reform movement that may come to light will have a chance at being taken as legitimate by the Iranian people and the world at large.



But before we get too excited, we must recall there is always also this possibility.

Meanwhile, we must sit and we wait; and view events from afar with a hopeful (if jaundiced) eye.

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Iran's existentialist moment of truth?

Now comes the inevitable crackdown from the Iranian regime. Unconfirmed reports of beatings, teargas, killings, and a suicide bomber that blew himself up in an important Khomeini shrine.

But out of all the stuff I've seen from Iran in the past week, I liked this (allegedly from a few hours ago, as the crackdown was getting underway) the most.



This day has a real "moment of truth" feel to it. May Iran find its way to a peaceful outcome with a minimum of bloodshed.

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"They are killing us all!"

There is an incredible and detailed first-hand account at Salon from a Tehran protester whose name was withheld for "reasons of personal safety". It details the swings between a festive mood and outright fear that Iranians are feeling from one moment to the next. The entire account is worth reading, but here are some tidbits that stood out for me: (all emphasis mine)

In the crowd there are families, young and old. One cannot help but notice the large presence of women of all ages. The typical daily life of the capital is out here together, the homes, sidewalks and boulevards abandoned for this shared space. There is word that the crowd is millions strong; we know that it stretches eastward to Imam Hussein Square.
...

All does not end well. Seeing the camera around my neck, several people rush up to me, frantically urging me to go take pictures, shouting, "They are killing us all!" Behind a wall, in an alleyway set off from the road, a confrontation is taking place between one spike of the crowd and basiji forces, holed up in a base. There is the unsettling pop-pop-pop of gunfire, and a plume of black smoke rises into the sky. A crowd is gathering in the alley and men rush forward to throw rocks while others tell them, "Stop, stop, that's what they want!"
...

To stop this now would take a tremendous display of violence and thus far, blessedly, that has not happened. And every day everyone says that in a few days the protests will be stopped, and what's the point of going out, but when the moment comes everyone is here.
...

In the late afternoon and lasting until around dinner time it is a place of peaceful civic celebration, a Disneyland of political action for the whole family to participate. At night, the mood shifts abruptly, and the capital becomes a battleground, a city in which fear stalks on motorbikes mounted in helmeted pairs.

Here in Canada meanwhile, the prospect of getting our apathetic asses to the polls for a summer vote is deemed so dreadful, our Opposition Leader has capitulated completely to a government he himself describes as incompetent. What a pushover. Frankly, I would have preferred this outcome.

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Iranians Maximizing Tweeter's Potential

I don't know if the revolution will be televised, but it sure as hell is being tweeted to the nth degree. It's pretty amazing to be able to read witness accounts unfolding in real time.

The below video is prefaced with the tweet: "Basijis breaking into homes in Tehran, terrorizing ppl, psychological warfare". I won't say who because other tweets beg us not to publish the names of Twitterers in Iran since government forces are using that to identify them.



Once again, a new communication technology takes centre stage to redefine our world.

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U.S. to bomb Iran in two weeks?

A couple of weeks ago, I was very disturbed to read Gwynne Dyer's article, Iran, Oil and Euros: the War Scenario.

Here's the scenario. On 20 March Iran opens a new "bourse" (exchange) on which countries all over the world can buy and sell oil and gas not only for dollars but also for euros. It also establishes a new oil "marker" (oil pricing standard) based on Iranian crude and denominated in euros, in open rivalry to the existing West Texas Intermediate, Norway Brent and UAE Dubai markers, all of which are calculated in US dollars.

The Iranian bourse is an instant success with countries and companies that are unhappy about having to hold huge amounts of overvalued US dollars to finance their oil transactions, all of which must presently be conducted in that currency. Very large sums start to shift from the dollar to the euro, although exactly how much is unknown because the US Federal Reserve System (by pure coincidence, of course) has chosen late March as the time to stop publishing the data that would make it easy to know how fast the haemorrhage was.

But the US government knows, and is deeply alarmed by the danger that the dollar may be losing its status as the world's only reserve currency. Given the huge deficits that plague the US economy, the US dollar's value would collapse if other countries began to see it as just another currency, so the euro must be prevented from emerging as an alternative reserve currency. In practice, that means the Iranian experiment with a euro-denominated oil bourse must be stopped -- and the only way to do that is to attack Iran.

Dyer goes on to say that such complex reasoning is far too cunning for the likes of the Bush administration, and concludes that if Iran is to be attacked, it will be for "other motives". Nevertheless, I have been trying to pay close attention to news reports about the ongoing standoff with Iran over their nuclear intentions (and this new bourse), but it has been such an eventful two weeks, little news has surfaced recently. And then I noticed this article from the Guardian:

The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran's nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting today of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which will forward a report on Iran's nuclear activities to the UN security council.

...According to Eric Illsley, a Labour committee member, (Bolton) told the MPs: "They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down."

...The Pentagon position was described, by the committee chairman, Mike Gapes, as throwing a demand for a militarily enforced embargo into the security council "like a hand grenade - and see what happens".

(On March 5th) Mr Bolton reiterated his hardline stance. In a speech to the annual convention of the American-Israel public affairs committee, the leading pro-Israel US lobbyists, he said: "The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve ... we must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses."

...According to Time magazine, the US plans to present the security council with evidence that Iran is designing a crude nuclear bomb, like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The evidence will be in the form of blueprints that the US said were found on a laptop belonging to an Iranian nuclear engineer, and obtained by the CIA in 2004.

Well, here we go again. It seems it's Bolton's job this time to stir up the Security Council. And now Cheney has heightened his war-drum beating rhetoric in lock-step:

...Vice President Cheney had already issued a blunt threat that Iran will face "meaningful consequences" if it fails to cooperate with international efforts to curb its nuclear program. Cheney told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday that the United States "is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime" and is sending "a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

Note the almost identical terminology between Bolton's "Everything is on the table" and Cheney's "keeping all options on the table" sound-bites. In Rove's White House, that's a clear sign there is a major selling game afoot with the American people. And if you really want to stay up late, browse through some of the articles cobbled together by NewsGateway on "the War on Iran". Most commentary I've seen agrees that an iInvasion seems unlikely as long as the U.S. military remains overstretched and bogged-down in Iraq; but major airstrikes are a piece of cake, and by at least one account (from three weeks ago), the order of the day:

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

I'm not liking this one bit.

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