Nothing hides incompetency like a war

There are a few people who use it with skill while others fumble about trying to locate the formula used by so-called Great Leaders in history.

George W. Bush, essentially a useful idiot for a much larger force, continually tried to shift the focus of Americans from his repeated acts of incompetency by deflecting their gaze in the general direction of war. He declared himself a "war president", even after he told Americans the best thing they could do was to "go shopping".

Surprisingly, the current US antagonist isn't in much better shape. In fact he could be worse. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has made an incredible mess of the place and despite public sabre-rattling, may be more unpopular with his electorate than Bush is with his.

Thomas P.M. Barnett illuminates the conditions which make war for two people in particular very appealing.

One is US presidential hopeful John McCain who, without an elevated level of fear among Americans, doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning.

The other is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who, without a war with the US or Israel, is almost certainly going to find himself on the unemployment roles and trying to survive in an economy which he is personally responsible for wrecking.

Looming behind the most crucial dynamics is the possible presidency of Barack Obama, suggesting that war may become inevitable due to the fear of peace. [...]

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency has been a disaster for the Iranian people. Despite all the oil wealth, inflation is raging and the economy goes nowhere. Add in a stunning birth dearth, the world's worst brain drain, plus Iranian prostitutes headlining European brothels, and this is clearly a society in a death spiral. With restless students chanting in public for Ahmadinejad's death, little wonder the man pines for a splendid little war.

Ahmadinejad's one popular success has been to champion Iran's brazen reach for nuclear capacity, an effort cleverly designed to emphasize the strategic dangers of attempted regime change by outsiders. [...] But Ahmadinejad's time grows short. A bevy of candidates seeks to oust him next year, and his opponents now head the parliament, the crucial Assembly of Experts and Tehran's city hall. With Obama currently leading decisively polls for the U.S. presidency, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, faces the prospect of losing his most useful -- for internal politics, that is -- external enemy, reducing Ahmadinejad's utility as frontman.

You really do need to read the whole column. For even more though, Barnett provide even more clarification on his blog.

That too, is something you need to read.

Problem right now is how many sides would welcome war. "U.S. Plays Down Military Showdown" is a couple of quotes from Gates and an Undersecretary of State, meaning two counties heard from but hardly the "U.S." that matters right now on this subject (Bush-Cheney). Both, in my mind, have no problem with an Israeli strike on their watch that could easily suck us into combat. Time is short.

Of course, you'll want a bottle of something after all of that. 151 over-proof should work for a short time.

A nuclear arsenal run by drunks

All countries possessing nuclear weapons should be prepared to provide, at the very least, advice to others in that "club" on how to secure and prevent the unauthorized employment of nuclear warheads. This is particularly true where there is a threat that religious extremists stand a chance of coming into possession of a fully developed and deliverable nuclear arsenal.

So, one country has made the offer to assist a nuclear power in dealing with their lax nuclear security and questions the judgment of country which places the authority to deploy nuclear weapons in the hands of drunks.

Via FP, Pakistan offers this on the United States:

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN, JANUARY 25--At a press conference in Islamabad today, Pakistani Brig. Gen. Atta M. Iqhman expressed concern about U.S. procedures for handling nuclear weapons. Iqhman, who oversees the safety and security of the Pakistani nuclear force, said that U.S. protocols for storing and handling nuclear weapons are inadequate. "In Pakistan, we store nuclear warheads separately from their delivery systems, and a nuclear warhead can only be activated if three separate officers agree," Iqhman said. "In the United States, almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons still sit atop missiles, on hair-trigger alert, and it only takes two launch-control officers to activate a nuclear weapon. The U.S. government has persistently ignored arms control experts around the world who have said they should at least de-alert their weapons."

Iqhman then offered to assist the United States with their nuclear handling protocols which received this response.

Pentagon officials said it is Washington's role to give, not receive, advice on nuclear weapons safety and surety issues.

Yes... we've noticed. In fact, we've noticed other events. So have the Pakistanis.

Iqhman pointed out that the August 29 event was not an isolated incident; there have been at least 24 accidents involving nuclear weapons on U.S. planes. He mentioned a 1966 incident in which four nuclear weapons fell to the ground when two planes collided over Spain, as well as a 1968 fire that caused a plane to crash in Greenland with four hydrogen bombs aboard. In 1980, a Titan II missile in Arkansas exploded during maintenance, sending a nuclear warhead flying 600 feet through the air. In a remark that visibly annoyed a U.S. official present at the briefing, Iqhman described the U.S. nuclear arsenal as "an accident waiting to happen."

Unfortunately, Iqhman, who was on a considerable role blew it part way through the press conference.

Jay Keuse of MSNBC News asked Iqhman if Pakistan was in any position to be lecturing other countries given Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's record of selling nuclear technology to other countries. "All nuclear weapons states profess to oppose proliferation while helping select allies acquire nuclear weapons technology," Iqhman replied. "The United States helped Britain and France obtain the bomb; France helped the Israelis; and Russia helped China. And China," he added coyly, "is said by Western media sources to have helped Pakistan. So why can't Pakistan behave like everyone else?"

Hold it right there. Iqhman has a remarkably good case going here and simply drops it. I can answer that last question. Because you clearly know it's wrong and you reduce the legitimacy of your position by trying to make two "wrongs" equal a "right". Having just successfully argued that the US does it wrong, and a good deal of the world would agree with that position, Iqhman justifies the behaviour of A.Q. Khan (and by extension, the Pakistani nuclear weapons program) by suggesting that if the US did it, others are excused in proceeding down the same path. Iqham cannot have it both ways.

Iqham, however, found that his deputy, Colonel Bom Zhalot, had something to add. Apparently Iqham was less than pleased with Zhalot when he went into a rant.

"We also worry that the U.S. commander-in-chief has confessed to having been an alcoholic. Here in Pakistan, alcohol is 'haram,' so this isn't a problem for us. Studies have also found that one-fifth of U.S. military personnel are heavy drinkers. How many of those have responsibility for nuclear weapons?"

John G. Libb of the Washington Times asked if Americans were wrong to be concerned about Pakistan's nuclear stockpile given the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. Colonel Zhalot replied: "Millions of Americans believe that these are the last days and that they will be raptured to heaven at the end of the world. You have a president who describes Jesus as his favorite philosopher, and one of the last remaining candidates in your presidential primaries is a preacher who doesn't believe in evolution. Many Pakistanis worry that the United States is being taken over by religious extremists who believe that a nuclear holocaust will just put the true believers on a fast track to heaven. We worry about a nutcase U.S. president destroying the world to save it."

You worry about it?! You mean he hasn't already started the process?

It Was Always About Oil: The Iran extra.

Why are Bush and the neocons continuing to beat war drums on Iran? Simple. The strength of the US dollar and the trading of US dollars for oil. Libby at Newshoggers reacted with some understandable shock and asks:

I used to hear a lot of speculation that the real reason we invaded Iraq was because Saddam was proposing the same sort of scheme. Could this be why the administration continues to overstate the threat of Iran?

What scheme, you ask? Well, Iran has just announced that they will not take US dollars for crude oil.

Major crude producer Iran has completely stopped carrying out its oil transactions in dollars, Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said on Saturday, labelling the greenback an "unreliable" currency.

"At the moment, selling oil in dollars has been completely halted, in line with the policy of selling crude in non-dollar currencies," Nozari was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

"The dollar is an unreliable currency, considering its devaluation and the oil exporters' losses," he added.

The world's fourth largest oil exporter, Iran has massively reduced its dependence on the dollar over the past year in the face of US pressures on its financial system and the fall in the dollar.

So let's go back a little ways and look at what happened in Iraq. I posted this in January.

In October, 2000 Saddam took the radical decision to move the currency of petroleum sales under the Oil-For-Food program from US dollars to Euros. He went even further by having the UN Oil-For-Food reserve fund converted to Euros. While many analysts suggested this would cost Iraq hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue most did not forecast the steady gain of the Euro against the US dollar. By January, 2003, Iraq’s original UN reserve fund of 10 billion dollars US had expanded to 26 billion Euros (24.8 billion US dollars). The currency conversion advantage recognized by Iraq was not lost on OPEC. Nor was it lost on the Bush administration. If OPEC started to move, however slowly, to Euros the US dollar would lose its supremacy in the world and the US economy would suffer. Imported goods, relatively cheap as long as the US dollar remained the dominant oil-trading currency, would shoot up in price. Britain shared in the concern. The UK trades oil for US dollars and one of the two major international oil exchanges is based in London, England. The slowness of Britain in converting to Euros as a national currency leaves them holding US dollar reserves. As a net importer of oil this works for them on the world market – unless major suppliers convert to Euros. Iraq, however, had tipped over the can and Saddam’s decision to convert from petro-dollars to petro-euros, even if it was purely emotional, had two major effects: it caused a strengthening of the Euro against the US dollar, impacting the US economy and, it put him and Iraq in a somewhat better light with the Europeans whose multi-national currency he was now using. The fact that a dollar to euro conversion had already taken place in Iraq gave the US and the UK nightmares.

It was after that happened, and Saddam had converted Iraq's oil trading currency, that the Bush administration started to rumble on about Iraq being militarily dangerous.

Far from being a scheme Saddam proposed, he actually took it one further and made the conversion complete by booking Iraq's oil revenues in Euros instead of US dollars.

We are all very well aware that before the al Qaeda attack on the US and before Afghanistan had ever made any significant appearance on the Bush administration radar, Bush and the neocons were formulating plans to remove Saddam from power.

Thus began the portrayal of Iraq as a military threat to the region and the world. The truth is, Iraq was militarily neutered and represented no threat at all. The intelligence used to support the neocon assertion to the contrary was, as we now know, cherry-picked, twisted and manufactured.

What Iraq represented was an economic threat. Not that Saddam's minimal oil production was having any serious effect on overall global supply, but that his conversion to Euros was providing an example for other OPEC producers. If others followed his path, the effect on the US dollar would be crippling.

The US relies on crude oil being traded in US dollars. It's a part of their economy. As a nation with a huge balance of trade deficit the only way the dollar retains any strength is if other countries hold US currency reserves. By making the US dollar the booked crude oil trading currency, the dollar retains strength. The consumer economy of the United States continues to hum along nicely because the US dollar, the strength of which requires other countries to demand them for payment and then use them to purchase other commodities, is the dominant global currency based solely on its demand outside the United States. Without that global demand the strength of the US dollar would plummet to a level which reflects US industrial output and its enormous debt.

Iran is now making the same moves Saddam made. This time however, Iran is not an insignificant player. At over 1.5 gigabarrels of production per year, Iran's conversion of currency is already having an effect on the US dollar. With the world's second largest known reserve of conventionally extracted crude oil (Canada has the second largest reserve if non-conventional extraction is the measure) Iran has an impact on both the global supply and the US dollar.

Despite the fact that the US prohibits the import of Iranian crude oil into the States, the US continued to reap the reward of a strong dollar as long as all other importers were required to book and pay for Iranian crude oil in US funds.

There is another similarity with Iraq that is causing the Bush administration to continue suggesting that Iran needs to be bombed/invaded/regime-changed.

Iraq had severe limitations imposed on it after the 1991 Gulf War. Since that time, Iraq has never reached its potential in oil production. European oil companies had started to make inroads in Saddam's Iraq in terms of rebuilding oil production infrastructure. Once sanctions had been eased on Iraq, (and they eventually would have been), it would leave European oil companies with exclusive access to the world's third largest conventional crude supply in a country that traded, not in US dollars, but in Euros. The next logical step would be the introduction of an oil exchange, without the US dollar as the trading currency.

Iran is in a similar situation. Its oil production infrastructure is in terrible condition. Since the fall of the Shah, Iran's oil output has fallen sharply and never recovered. To rebuild its oil infrastructure it would be a sure bet that Iran would turn to almost any country other than the United States. Iran has been working feverishly to set up an oil bourse which trades in a currency other than the US dollar.

With already declaring that the US dollar is no longer an acceptable exchange for Iranian crude oil, Iran is starting to look very much like Iraq did in 2000/2001.

A Bush administration target.