Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation:

Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation:
Understanding the Planned Assault on Iran
February 10, 2006
http://globalresearch.ca

Iran has been in the gun-sights of George W. Bush and his entourage
from the moment that he was parachuted into the presidency in
November 2000 by his father's Supreme Court.
A year ago there were signs, duly reported by Seymour Hersh and
others, that the United States and Israel were working out the
targeting details of an aerial attack on Iran that it was anticipated
would occur in June 2005 (see Hersh, Gush Shalom, Jensen). But as
Michel Chossudovsky wrote in May 2005, widespread reports that George
W. Bush had "signed off on" an attack on Iran did not signify that
the attack would necessarily occur during the summer of 2005: what
the 'signing off' suggested was rather "that the US and Israel
[were] 'in a state of readiness' and [were] prepared to launch an
attack by June or at a later date. In other words, the decision to
launch the attack [had] not been made" (Chossudovsky: May 2005).

Since December 2005, however, there have been much firmer indications
both that the planned attack will go ahead in late March 2006, and
also that the Cheney-Bush administration intends it to involve the
use of nuclear weapons.

It is important to understand the nature and scale of the war crimes
that are being planned—and no less important to recognize that, as in
the case of the Bush regime's assault on Iraq, the pretexts being
advanced to legitimize this intended aggression are entirely
fraudulent. Unless the lurid fantasies of people like former
Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and now
Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton count as evidence—and
Bolton's pronouncements on the weaponry supposedly possessed by Iraq,
North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela show him to be less acquainted with
truth than Jean Harlow was with chastity—there is no evidence that
Iran has or has ever had any nuclear weapons development program.
Claims to the contrary, however loudly they may have been trumpeted
by Fox News, CNN, or The New York Times, are demonstrably false.

Nor does there appear to be the remotest possibility, whatever
desperate measures the Iranian government might be frightened into by
American and Israeli threats of pre-emptive attacks, that Iran would
be able to produce nuclear weapons in the near future. On August 2,
2005, The Washington Post reported that according to the most recent
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which represents a consensus
arrived at among U.S. intelligence agencies, "Iran is about a decade
away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon,
roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years" (Linzer, quoted
by Clark, 28 Jan. 2006).

The coming attack on Iran has nothing whatsoever to do with concerns
about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Its primary motive, as
oil analyst William Clark has argued, is rather a determination to
ensure that the U.S. dollar remains the sole world currency for oil
trading. Iran plans in March 2006 to open a Teheran Oil Bourse in
which all trading will be carried out in Euros. This poses a direct
threat to the status of the U.S. dollar as the principal world
reserve currency—and hence also to a trading system in which massive
U.S. trade deficits are paid for with paper money whose accepted
value resides, as Krassimir Petrov notes, in its being the currency
in which international oil trades are denominated. (U.S. dollars are
effectively exchangeable for oil in somewhat the same way that, prior
to 1971, they were at least in theory exchangeable for gold.)

But not only is this planned aggression unconnected to any actual
concern over Iranian nuclear weapons. There is in fact some reason to
think that the preparations for it have involved deliberate
violations by the Bush neo-conservatives of anti-proliferation
protocols (and also, necessarily, of U.S. law), and that their long-
term planning, in which Turkey's consent to the aggression is a
necessary part, has involved a deliberate transfer of nuclear weapons
technology to Turkey as a part of the pay-off.

Prior to her public exposure by Karl Rove, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, and
other senior administration officials in July 2003, CIA agent Valerie
Plame was reportedly involved in undercover anti-proliferation work
focused on transfers of nuclear technology to Turkey that were being
carried out by a network of crooked businessmen, arms dealers,
and 'rogue' officials within the U.S. government. The leaking of
Plame's identity as a CIA agent was undoubtedly an act of revenge for
her husband Joseph Wilson's public revelation that one of the key
claims used to legitimize the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein's
supposed acquisition of uranium ore from Niger, was known by the Bush
regime to be groundless. But Plame's exposure also conveniently put
an end to her investigative work. Some of the senior administration
officials responsible for that crime of state have long-term
diplomatic and military connections to Turkey, and all of them have
been employed in what might be called (with a nod to ex-White House
speechwriter David Frum) the Cheney-Bolton Axis of Aggression. Thanks
to the courage and integrity of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds,
there is evidence dating from 2002 of high-level involvement in the
subversion of FBI investigations into arms trafficking with Turkey.
The leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent may therefore
have been not merely an act of revenge for her husband's contribution
to the delegitimizing of one war of aggression, but also a tactical
maneuver in preparation for the next one.

George W. Bush made clear his aggressive intentions in relation to
Iran in his 2002 State of the Union address; and his regime's record
on issues of nuclear proliferation has been, to put it mildly,
equivocal. If, as seems plausible, Bush's diplomats had been secretly
arranging that Turkey's reward for connivance in an attack on Iran
should include its future admission into the charmed circle of
nuclear powers, then the meddling interference of servants of the
state who, like Plame and Edmonds, were putting themselves or at
least their careers at risk in the cause of preventing nuclear
weapons proliferation, was not to be tolerated.

The ironies are glaring. The U.S. government is contemplating an
unprovoked attack upon Iran that will involve "pre-emptive" use of
nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-weapons-holding state. Although
the pretext is that this is necessary to forestall nuclear weapons
proliferation, there is evidence to suggest that planning for the
attack has involved, very precisely, nuclear weapons proliferation by
the United States.

It would appear that this sinister complex of criminality involves
one further twist. There have been indications that the planned
attack may be immediately preceded (and of course 'legitimized') by
another 9/11-type event within the U.S.

Let us review these issues in sequence.

Plans for a conventional and 'tactical' nuclear attack on Iran

On August 1, 2005 Philip Giraldi, an ex-CIA agent and associate of
Vincent Cannistraro (the former head of the CIA's counter-
intelligence operations and former intelligence director at the
National Security Council), published an article entitled "Deep
Background" in The American Conservative. The first section of this
article carried the following headline: "In Washington it is hardly a
secret that the same people in and around the administration who
brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran." I quote the
first section of Giraldi's article in its entirety:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick
Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command
(STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in
response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.
The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both
conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more
than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected
nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are
hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by
conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of
Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved
in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several
senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly
appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is
being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared
to damage his career by posing any objections."

The implications of this report are breathtaking. First, it indicates
on the part of the ruling Cheney faction within the American state a
frank in-house acknowledgment that their often-repeated public claims
of a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and the 9/11 attacks
are the rubbish that informed people have long known them to be.

At a deeper level, it implies that "9/11-type terrorist attacks" are
recognized in Cheney's office and the Pentagon as appropriate means
of legitimizing wars of aggression against any country selected for
that treatment by the regime and its corporate propaganda-
amplification system. (Though the implicit acknowledgment is
shocking, the fact itself should come as no surprise, since recent
research has shown that the Bush administration was deeply implicated
not merely in permitting the attacks of September 11, 2001 to happen,
but in actually organizing them: see Chossudovsky 2002: 51-63, 144-
56; Chossudovsky 2005: 51-62, 135-46, 237-61; Griffin 2004: 127-46,
169-201; Griffin 2005: 115-35, 277-91; Marrs 134-37; and Ruppert 309-
436.)

And finally, Giraldi's report suggests that the recent U.S.
development of comparatively low-yield nuclear weapons specifically
designed to destroy hardened underground facilities, and the recent
re-orientation of U.S. nuclear policy to include first-strike or pre-
emptive nuclear attacks on non-nuclear powers, were both part of long-
range planning for a war on Iran.

Articles published by William Arkin in the Washington Post in May and
October 2005 reported on what the U.S. military's STRATCOM calls
CONPLAN 8022, a global plan for bombing and missile attacks
involving "a nuclear option" anywhere in the world that was tested in
an exercise that began on November 1, 2005; the scenario for this
exercise scripted a dirty-bomb attack on Mobile, Alabama to which
STRATCOM responded with nuclear and conventional strikes on an
unnamed east-Asian country that was transparently meant for North
Korea.

Jorge Hirsch has outlined the deployment of key administrative
personnel and of ideological legitimations in preparation for a
nuclear attack on Iran (Hirsch, 16 Dec. 2005). And Michel
Chossudovsky has described the command structure that has been set up
to implement STRATCOM's current plans for preemptive 'theatre'
nuclear warfare (see Chossudovsky 2006). But it must be emphasized
that these plans, as tested in November 2005 in the exercise referred
to by Arkin, involve the creation of an impression of what theorists
of nuclear war call "proportionality." An attack on Iran, which would
presumably involve the use of significant numbers of
extremely 'dirty' earth-penetrating nuclear bombs, might well be made
to follow a dirty-bomb attack on the United States, which would be
represented in the media as having been carried out by Iranian
agents.

Yet as Giraldi indicates, although the bombing of Iran would follow
and be represented as a response to "another 9/11-type terrorist
attack on the United States," the planned pattern involves a cynical
separation of appearance from reality: "the response is not
conditional on Iran actually being involved in [this] act of
terrorism... ."

Earth-Penetrator 'dirty bombs

Talk about "low-yield" nuclear weapons, by the way, means simply that
the most recent U.S. nuclear weapons can be set to detonate with much
less than their maximum explosive force. The maximum power of the B61-
11 earth-penetrating "bunker-buster" bomb ranges, by different
accounts, from 300 to 340 or 400 kilotons (see Nelson; Hirsch, 9 Jan.
2006). (By way of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in
August, 1945, killing some 80,000 people outright, and a further
60,000 over the next several months due to radiation poisoning and
other injuries, had a yield of 15 kilotons.) The lowest-yield setting
of the BL61-11 is reportedly 0.3 kilotons—equivalent, that is to say,
to the detonation of 300 tons of TNT.

But since these new weapons are designed as earth-penetrating "bunker-
buster" rather than air-burst bombs, each one can be expected to
produce large volumes of very 'dirty' radioactive fallout. Robert
Nelson of the Federation of American Scientists writes that even at
the low end of the B61-11 bomb's yield range, "the nuclear blast will
simply blow out a huge crater of radioactive material, creating a
lethal gamma-radiation field over a large area." The very intense
local fallout will include both "radioactivity from the fission
products" and also "large amounts of dirt and debris [that] has been
exposed to the intense neutron flux from the nuclear detonation"; the
blast cloud produced by such a bomb "typically consists of a narrow
column and a broad base surge of air filled with radioactive dust
which expands to a radius of over a mile for a 5 kiloton explosion."

Yet wouldn't the "tactical" and "low-yield" nature of these weapons
mean that civilian casualties could be kept to a minimum? A study
published in 2005 by the National Research Council on the Effects of
Nuclear Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons offers estimates of the
casualties that could be caused by these weapons. According to
Conclusion 6 of this report, an attack in or near a densely populated
urban area could be expected, depending on the B61-11's yield
setting, to kill from several thousand to over a million people. An
attack in a remote, lightly populated area might kill as few as
several hundred people—or, with a high-yield setting and unfavourable
winds, hundreds of thousands.

But what kinds of yield settings might the U.S. military want to use?
Conclusion 5 of the NRC report might seem to suggest that genuinely
low-yield settings might be possible: the yield required "to destroy
a hard and deeply buried target is reduced by a factor of 15 to 25 by
enhanced ground-shock coupling if the weapon is detonated a few
meters below the surface." Conclusion 2, however, is more sobering.
To have a high probability of destroying a facility 200 metres
underground, an earth-penetrating weapon with a yield of 300 kilotons
would be required—that is to say, a weapon with twenty times the
explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. Extrapolating from the
information the report provides, one might guess that a weapon in the
7-8 kiloton range—with half the power of the Hiroshima bomb—could be
deployed against a facility like Natanz, the sensitive parts of which
are buried 18 metres underground and protected by reinforced concrete
(Beeston). A similar or smaller weapon might be used against the
uranium fuel enrichment facility at Esfahan—a city of two million
people which is also, by the way, a UNESCO World Heritage City.

The NRC report, it should be noted, was written by a committee, and
one that on the issue of civilian casualties seems to have had some
difficulty in making up its collective mind. Conclusion 4 of the
report informs us that "For the same yield and weather conditions,
the number of casualties from an earth-penetrator weapon detonated at
a few meters depth is, for all practical purposes, equal to that from
a surface burst of the same weapon yield." But Conclusion 7 tells a
different story: "For urban targets, civilian casualties from nuclear
earth-penetrator weapons are reduced by a factor of 2 to 10 compared
with those from a surface burst having 25 times the yield."

The most charitable interpretation I can give to Conclusion 7 is that
it was composed for a readership of arithmetical illiterates—who the
authors assume will be unable to deduce that what is actually being
said (assuming a linear relation between yield and casualties) is
that an earth-penetrating weapon will cause from 2.5 to 12.5 times
more casualties than a surface-burst weapon of the same explosive
power.

In light of the fact that the NRC report was commissioned by the
United States Congress, we can ourselves conclude that the U.S.
government is contemplating, open-eyed, a war of aggression that
American planners are fully aware will kill—at the very least—many
tens of thousands, and perhaps many hundreds of thousands of
civilians.
The pretexts

The principal reason being advanced for an attack upon Iran is the
claim that Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear threat with the
capacity and presumably the intention of launching nuclear ballistic-
missile attacks upon Israel and even western Europe and the United
States.

Iran does possess ballistic missiles, including the Shahab-3, which
with a range of 1300 kilometers is capable of striking Israel, as
well as U.S. forces throughout the Middle East. (Why Iran would dream
of initiating military aggression against the U.S. or against Israel,
which possesses an arsenal of some 200 nuclear warheads, together
with multiple means of delivering them, including ballistic missiles,
is not explained.)

A fear-mongering article published by The Guardian on January 4,
2006, included the information that the next generation of the Shahab
missile "should be capable of reaching Austria and Italy." The
leading sentence of this same article declares that "The Iranian
government has been successfully scouring Europe for the
sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according
to the latest western assessment of the country's weapons programmes"
(Cobain and Traynor). But neither this article nor a companion piece
(Traynor and Cobain) published the same day provides any evidence
that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program, even though both
articles were based upon a "report from a leading EU intelligence
service," a "55-page intelligence assessment, dated July 1 2005,
[that] draws upon material gathered by British, French, German and
Belgian agencies."

There is in fact very good evidence, in the form of exhaustive
inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2003,
that Iran does not have and has never had any such program. As the
physicist Gordon Prather wrote in September 2005, "after two years of
go-anywhere, see-anything inspections, [the IAEA] has found no
indication that any special nuclear materials or activities involving
them are being—or have been—used in furtherance of a military
purpose" (Prather, 27 Sept. 2005).

But what about intentions? The Guardian journalists inform us
that "western leaders ... have long refused to believe Tehran's
insistence that it is not interested in developing nuclear weapons
and is only trying to develop nuclear power for electricity" (Cobain
and Traynor). Perhaps it is time these "western leaders"—George W.
Bush, Tony Blair, and whatever rag-tag and bob-tail of lesser
luminaries they are dragging after them—began to attend to the facts.

A good place to start might be with William Beeman's and Thomas
Stauffer's assessment of the physical evidence for an Iranian nuclear
weapons program. (Stauffer, by the way, is a former nuclear engineer
and specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics; Beeman directs
Brown University's Middle East Studies program; both have conducted
research on Iran for three decades.) Beeman and Stauffer note that
Iran has three principal nuclear facilities.

Of the first two, a uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and a
deuterium research facility in Arak, they remark that "Neither is in
operation. The only question of interest is whether these facilities
offer a plausible route to the manufacture of plutonium-based nuclear
bombs, and the short answer is: They do not."

Beeman and Stauffer compare the third facility, the PWR
pressurized "light-water" reactor under construction at Bushehr, with
Israel's heavy-water graphite-moderated plant at Dimona. The Bushehr
reactor is designed to maximize power output through long fuel cycles
of 30 to 40 months; it will produce plutonium isotopes (PU240, 241
and 242) that are "almost impossible to use in making bombs";
and "the entire reactor will have to shut down—a step that cannot be
concealed from satellites, airplanes and other sources—in order to
permit the extraction of even a single fuel pin." Israel's Dimona
plant, in contrast, produces the bomb-making isotope PU239; moreover,
it "can be re-fueled 'on line,' without shutting down. Thus, high-
grade plutonium can be obtained covertly and continuously."

Claims emanating from the U.S. State Department to the effect that
Iran possesses uranium-enrichment centrifuges or covert plutonium-
extraction facilities are dismissed by Beeman and Stauffer as
implausible, since "the sources are either unidentified or are the
same channels which disseminated the stories about Iraq's non-
conventional weapons or the so-called chemical and biological weapons
plant in Khartoum."

As Michael T. Klare remarks, the U.S. government's "claim that an
attack on Iran would be justified because of its alleged nuclear
potential should invite widespread skepticism." But skeptical
intelligence appears to be the last thing one can expect from the
corporate media, whose organs report without blinking Condoleezza
Rice's threat that "The world will not stand by if Iran continues on
the path to a nuclear weapons capability" (see [Rice]), and George W.
Bush's equally inane declaration, following the IAEA's vote to refer
Iran to the UN Security Council, that "This important step sends a
clear message to the regime in Iran that the world will not permit
the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons" (see [Bush]).

There is much to be said about the sorry process of propagandizing,
diplomatic bullying, and behind-the-scenes blackmail and arm-twisting
within the IAEA and in other forums—all of it strongly reminiscent of
the maneuverings of late 2002 and early 2003—that has led to the
present situation, where in early March the Security Council will be
called upon, as in the case of Iraq three years ago, to accept and
legitimize the falsehoods on which the new war of aggression is to be
based. The early stages of this process were lucidly analyzed by
Siddharth Varadarajan in three fine articles in September 2005. Its
more recent phases have been assessed by Gordon Prather in a series
of articles published since mid-September 2005, and also, with equal
scrupulousness and ethical urgency, by another well-informed
physicist, Jorge Hirsch, who has been publishing essays on the
subject since mid-October. I will not repeat here the analyses
developed in their articles (the titles of which are included in the
list of sources which follows this text). But Varadarajan's recent
summary judgment of the diplomatic process is worth quoting: "Each
time it appeases Washington's relentless pressure on Iran, the
international community is being made to climb higher and higher up a
ladder whose final rungs can only be sanctions and war. This is
precisely the route the U.S. followed against Iraq in its quest to
effect regime change there" (Varadarajan, 1 Feb. 2006).

It is also worth saying something, however briefly, about the media
campaign that has accompanied the diplomatic preparations for war.
This has included, since mid-2005, accusations that that Iran was
involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, some of whose perpetrators
are alleged (by members of the wholly discredited Kean Commission of
inquiry into the events of 9/11) to have passed through Iran on their
way to the U.S. (see Coman; Hirsch, 28 Dec. 2005; and also, if you
believe The 9/11 Commission Report to have any credibility, Griffin
2005).

A more relevant accusation surfaced in November 2005, when the New
York Times reported that senior U.S. intelligence officials had
briefed IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei and his senior staff
on information gleaned from a "stolen Iranian laptop computer" which
they said demonstrated that Iran had developed nuclear weapons
compact enough to fit onto its Shahab missiles. But as Gordon Prather
wrote, "'sources close to the IAEA' said what they had been briefed
on appeared to be aerodynamic design work for a ballistic missile
reentry vehicle, which certainly couldn't contain a nuke if the
Iranians didn't have any. Furthermore, according to David Albright, a
sometime consultant to the IAEA, who has actually had access to
the 'stolen Iranian laptop,' the information on it is all about
reentry vehicles and 'does not contain words such [as] 'nuclear'
and 'nuclear warhead'" (Prather, 23 Nov. 2005).

Sorry, boys: no biscuit.

And yet the object of the exercise was evidently not to persuade the
IAEA people, who are not idiots, but rather to get the story into the
amplification system of that Mighty Wurlitzer, the corporate media.

This strategy has evidently worked. The New York Times, for example,
may have parted company with Judith Miller, the 'star' reporter whose
sordid job was to serve as a conduit for Bush regime misinformation
during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, but in Elaine Sciolino
they have a reporter who is no less skilled in passing off neocon
propaganda as fact (see Prather, 7 Jan. 2006). The New York Times
also gave front-page space in mid-January to an article by Richard
Bernstein and Stephen Weisman proposing "that Iran has
restarted 'research that could give it technology to create nuclear
weapons'" (quoted by Whitney, 17 Jan. 2006). "Perhaps," Mike Whitney
suggests, "the NY Times knows something that the IAEA inspectors
don't? If so, they should step forward and reveal the facts."

The key facts, as Whitney wrote on January 17, are that there is no
evidence that Iran has either a nuclear weapons program or
centrifuges with which to enrich uranium to weapons-grade
concentration. "These are the two issues which should be given
greatest consideration in determining whether or not Iran poses a
real danger to its neighbors, and yet these are precisely the facts
that are absent from the nearly 2,500 articles written on the topic
in the last few days." Add to these the further fact, noted above,
that the August 2005 National Intelligence Estimate doubled the time
American agencies thought Iran would need to manufacture "the key
ingredient for a nuclear weapon" from the previous estimate of five
years to a full decade.

Why then is the American public being incited to ever greater anxiety
in the face of a weapons program which—on the paranoid and unproven
assumption that it actually exists—is if anything a receding rather
than a gathering threat?

Fox News has led the way among the non-print media in drum-beating
and misinformation—to the extent, as Paul Craig Roberts observes,
that a Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll can plausibly report "that 60% of
Republicans, 41% of Independents, and 36% of Democrats support using
air strikes and ground troops against Iran in order to prevent Iran
from developing nuclear weapons." Worse yet, an LA Times/Bloomberg
poll apparently finds that 57% of the respondents "favor military
intervention if Iran's government pursues a program that would enable
it to build nuclear arms." Any civilian nuclear power program opens
up this possibility (Canada, had it so desired, could have become a
nuclear-weapons power forty years ago)—but the function of the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is precisely to open the way to
peaceful nuclear power generation while preventing the further
dissemination of nuclear weapons. What the LA Times/Bloomberg poll
therefore means, Roberts says, is that "if Iran exercises its rights
under the non-proliferation treaty, 57% of Americans support a US
military attack on Iran!"

Numbers like these suggest that George W. Bush will indeed get the
new war he so desires. And it appears that he will get it soon. As
Newt Gingrich declared on Fox News in late January, the matter is so
urgent that the attack must happen within the next few
months. "According to Gingrich, Iran not only cannot be trusted with
nuclear technology, but also Iranians 'cannot be trusted with their
oil'" (Roberts).

The Euro-denominated Tehran Oil Bourse

Gingrich's wording may sound faintly ludicrous. However, it would
appear to be a slanting allusion to the fact that the Iranian
government has announced plans to open an Iranian Oil Bourse in March
2006. This Bourse will be in direct competition with the New York
Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and London's International Petroleum
Exchange (IPE)—and unlike them will do business not in U.S. dollars,
but in euros. What Gingrich evidently means is that the Iranians
cannot be trusted to market their oil and natural gas in a manner
that continues to benefit the United States.

Peter Phillips and his colleagues in Project Censored explained very
clearly in 2003 how the current U.S. dollar-denominated system of oil
and gas marketing provides the U.S. with a highly advantageous system
of exchange. In 1971, "President Nixon removed U.S. currency from the
gold standard":

"Since then, the world's supply of oil has been traded in U.S. fiat
dollars, making the dollar the dominant world reserve currency.
Countries must provide the United States with goods and services for
dollars—which the United States can freely print. To purchase energy
and pay off any IMF debts, countries must hold vast dollar reserves.
The world is attached to a currency that one country can produce at
will. This means that in addition to controlling world trade, the
United States is importing substantial quantities of goods and
services for very low relative costs." (Phillips)

As Krassimir Petrov has observed, this amounts to an indirect form of
imperial taxation. Unlike previous empires, which extracted direct
taxes from their subject-nations, the American empire
has "distributed instead its own fiat currency, the U.S. Dollar, to
other nations in exchange for goods with the intended consequence of
inflating and devaluing those dollars and paying back later each
dollar with less economic goods—the difference capturing the U.S.
imperial tax."

Oil, backed by military power, has provided the rest of the world
with a reason for accepting depreciating U.S. dollars and holding
ever-increasing amounts of them in reserve. Petrov remarks that in
1972-73 the U.S. made "an iron-clad arrangement with Saudi Arabia to
support the power of the House of Saud in exchange for accepting only
U.S. dollars for its oil. The rest of OPEC was to follow suit and
accept only dollars. Because the world had to buy oil from the Arab
oil countries, it had the reason to hold dollars as payment for oil.
[... .] Even though dollars could no longer be exchanged for gold,
they were now exchangeable for oil" (Petrov).

But as Phillips notes, the economic reasons alone for switching to
the euro as a reserve currency have been becoming steadily more
persuasive: "Because of huge trade deficits, it is estimated that the
dollar is currently [in late 2003] overvalued by at least 40 percent.
Conversely, the euro-zone does not run huge deficits, uses higher
interest rates, and has an increasingly larger share of world trade.
As the euro establishes its durability and comes into wider use, the
dollar will no longer be the world's only option." The result will be
to make it "easier for other nations to exercise financial leverage
against the United States without damaging themselves or the global
financial system as a whole."

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, several analysts suggested that one
very obvious motive for that war was the fact that, beginning in
November 2000, Iraq had insisted on payment in euros, not dollars,
for its oil. In mid-2003, by which time the U.S. had made clear the
intended terms of its occupation of Iraq, one such analyst, Coilin
Nunan, remarked that it remained "just a theory" that American
threats against Iraq had been made on behalf of the petro-dollar
system—"but a theory that subsequent U.S. actions have done little to
dispel: the U.S. has invaded Iraq and installed its own authority to
rule the country, and as soon as Iraqi oil became available to sell
on the world market, it was announced that payment would be in
dollars only" (Phillips). William Clark writes, more directly, that
the invasion was principally about "gaining strategic control over
Iraq's hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintain[ing] the US$ as
the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market"
(Clark, 28 Jan. 2006).

There is currently some debate over the extent to which U.S. war
preparations against Iran are motivated by concern for the continued
hegemony of the petrodollar (see Nunan). I find the analyses of
William Clark and Krassimir Petrov persuasive.

Clark notes that an important obstacle to any major shift in the oil
marketing system has been "the lack of a euro-denominated oil pricing
standard, or oil 'marker' as it is referred to in the industry." (The
current "oil markers," in relation to which other internationally
traded oil is priced, are Norway Brent crude, West Texas Intermediate
crude [WTI], and United Arab Emirates [UAE] Dubai crude—all of them
U.S. dollar denominated.) In his opinion, "it is logical to assume
the proposed Iranian bourse will usher in a fourth crude oil marker—
denominated in the euro currency," and will thus "remove the main
technical obstacle for a broad-based petro-euro system for
international oil trades." This will have the effect of
introducing "petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging, and
fundamentally new dynamics to the biggest market in the world—global
oil and gas trades. In essence, the US will no longer be able to
effortlessly expand credit via US Treasury bills, and the US$'s
demand/liquidity value will fall" (Clark, 28 Jan. 2006).

An even partial loss of the U.S. dollar's position as the dominant
reserve currency for global energy trading would, as Petrov suggests,
lead to a sharp decline in its value and an ensuing acceleration of
inflation and upward pressure on interest rates, with unpleasant
consequences. "At this point, the Fed will find itself between Scylla
and Charybdis—between deflation and hyperinflation—it will be forced
fast either to take its 'classical medicine' by deflating, whereby it
raises interest rates, thus inducing a major economic depression, a
collapse in real estate, and an implosion in bond, stock, and
derivative markets [... ], or alternatively, to take the Weimar way
out by inflating, [... ] drown[ing] the financial system in liquidity
[... ] and hyperinflating the economy."

Any attempt, on the other hand, to preserve what Mike Whitney calls
the "perfect pyramid-scheme" of America's currency monopoly (Whitney,
23 Jan. 2006) by means of military aggression against Iran is likely
to result in equal or greater disruptions to the world economy.
American military aggression, which might conceivably include
attempts to occupy Iran's oil-producing Khuzestan province and the
coastline along the Straits of Hormuz (see Pilger), will not just
have appalling consequences for civilians throughout the region; it
may also place American forces into situations still more closely
analogous than the present stage of Iraqi resistance to the situation
produced in Lebanon by Israel's invasion of that country—which ended
in 2000 with Israel's first military defeat (see Salama and Ruster).
The involvement of Turkey

One significant difference between the warnings of a coming war
circulating in early 2005 and those which have appeared in recent
months is the current evidence of feverish diplomatic activity
between Washington and Ankara. The NATO powers have evidently been co-
opted into Washington's war plans: the so-called EU-3 (France,
Germany, and Britain) presented Iran with a negotiating position on
the nuclear fuel cycle for Iran's power plants that seemed designed
to produce an indignant refusal. (As Aijaz Ahmad writes, the European
group "was not negotiating; it was relaying to Iran, and to all and
sundry, what the U.S. was demanding and threatening to report Iran to
the Security Council if the latter did not comply. Everyone knows
that Iran had closed its Isphahan facility voluntarily, as a
confidence-building measure, expecting some reciprocity, and then re-
opened it, in retaliation, after having waited for reciprocity for
many months and not getting it—indeed, receiving only escalated
demands.")

But according to the well-connected Jürgen Gottslich, writing in Der
Spiegel in late December, Iran was not discussed during the new
German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung's recent visit to
Washington. Gottslich wrote that "the speculation surrounding an
American strike against Iran centers more on developments in Turkey.
There has been a definite surge in visits to Ankara by high-ranking
National Security personnel from the U.S. and by NATO officials.
Within the space of just a few days, FBI Director Robert Mueller,
[CIA] Director [Porter] Goss and then NATO Secretary General Jaap de
Hoop Scheffer visited Turkey." Condoleezza Rice also flew to Turkey
immediately after her December trip to Berlin.

The aim of these visits has quite obviously been to bring Turkey into
line with a planned attack on Iran. As Gottslich writes, "On his
Istanbul visit, Goss is alleged to have given Turkish security
services three dossiers that prove Iranian cooperation with al-Qaeda.
In addition, there was a fourth dossier focusing on the current state
of Iran's nuclear weapons program."

But why, beyond the obvious fact of Turkey's shared border with Iran,
should Turkey be such an important factor in American war plans? The
answer is suggested by an article published by an American academic,
Robert Olson, in the June 2002 issue of Middle East Policy. According
to Noam Chomsky, Olson "reports that 12 percent of Israel's offensive
aircraft are to be 'permanently stationed in Turkey' and have
been 'flying reconnaissance flights along Iran's border,' signaling
to Iran 'that it would soon be challenged elsewhere by Turkey and its
Israeli and American allies'" (Chomsky 159). These Israeli aircraft
would evidently take part in any American and Israeli aerial attack
on Iran, and Turkish consent would no doubt be necessary for their
use in such an act.

What advantages might Turkey hope to gain from its consent? The
collaboration of Britain, France and Germany in the cranking up of
diplomatic pressure on Iran might suggest that Turkey's much-desired
admission to the European Union could have been held out as one
carrot—possibly with the argument that participation in an attack on
a fundamentalist Islamic state could be one way of calming European
fears over the entry of a Muslim nation into the Union. An equally
persuasive advantage may have been a secret promise of future
admission to the select group of nuclear powers.

Christopher Deliso has assembled evidence both of Turkey's persistent
involvement in the smuggling and production of nuclear weapons
technology, including centrifuge components and triggering devices
(Deliso, 21 Nov. 2005)—and also of the very interesting fact that the
key administration officials involved in the outing of Valerie Plame,
who was investigating these murky operations, included people, among
them Marc Grossman, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, who give every
appearance of having been centrally involved in the very network of
nuclear arms proliferation that the CIA was working to uncover
(Deliso, 24 Nov. 2005). Even when supplemented by Sibel Edmonds'
indications of high-level collaboration in the frustration by Turkish
agents of the FBI's parallel investigations of what appears to be the
same network, the evidence remains at best suppositious. And yet
despite the inaccessibility of details—which will no doubt remain
inaccessible for as long as Dick Cheney, John Bolton and the rest
retain the power to frustrate investigations into the activities of
their close associates and subordinates—the larger pattern is, to say
the least, intriguing. The same highly-placed neoconservatives who
have been crying wolf over Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons appear
to have been deeply—and lucratively—involved in the trafficking of
restricted and forbidden weapons technology into Turkey.

Should this pattern turn out indeed to involve corruption, hypocrisy,
and treachery on the grand scale that Deliso's investigative
reporting would suggest, is there any reason one should be surprised?

What else, to be frank, would you expect from people such as these?


Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer is Associate
Professor of English at the University of Guelph. He is a former
President of the Association of Canadian College and University
Teachers of English. His recent writings include a series of articles
on electoral fraud in the 2004 US presidential election published by
the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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found at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/02/333938.shtml