The Persian Dilemma
Today is Friday, 23 June 2006.
Submitted for your consideration: a nation is No. 2 in the world in proven reserves of crude oil, and No. 2 in the world in natural gas reserves. Wouldn’t one think the regime of Warlord W. Bush would be looking for any opportunity to be friends?
Not if the nation is Iran.
As has been previously noted in these pages, Iran has few reasons to trust con-servative Republican American presidents, such as Bush (or con-servative Democratic presidents, such as Carter, for that matter). In 1953, the Eisenhower/J.F. Dulles/A.W. Dulles “axis of evil” overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and re-installed the corrupt dictatorship of “Shah” Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former Nazi sympathizer.
Every president up to and including Carter continued this support, for the “axis of evil” is longitudinal in time as well as in space. This support sufficed until the Revolution of 1979, after which the hard-line faction of the Muslim clergy (the Persian equivalents of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson) triumphed over the secularists, and created their own squalid dictatorship.
Well, when did being a squalid dictatorship ever stop con-servative American presidents from making nice, if there was profit to be had?
Flynt Leverett, former senior director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, published a perceptive essay concerning Iran on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times for 20 June 2006. Leverett and the Museum of the Bourgeois have independently reached many of the same analyses, albeit prescribing different courses of treatment.
As Leverett notes, Iran requires investment of at least $160 billion over the next 25 years in order to convert its oil and gas reserves into salable product. To date, only $15 to $20 billion has been attracted from European and Japanese investors. Guess who’d like to help, and get their hands on the spigots and product?
The People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.
Both the PRC and the RF fear American unilateralism, fear a world in which there truly is only one global superpower, and they are both permanently confined to the second tier, mere regional “great powers”. What if the PRC were to play the RF card, and vice versa? Would an “Islamic Bomb” truly be too much a price for them to pay, if they could divide access to Iran’s buried treasures, and deny them to the USE/USSA (United States Empire/United and Subject States)?
Ironic, isn’t it? A con-servative Republican American president, who should be at the head of the class in seeing the advantages of exercising American economic imperialist hegemony over Iran’s oil and gas (the 21st century way to play the Great Game), can only think of ensuring his place in History by military conquest. (So 19th century. B.C., that is.)
(Richard Nixon seems to have imagined himself as George C. Scott playing at Patton. Does the preening Warlord W. Bush imagine himself as Colin Farrell playing at Alexander?)
Of course, the MoB is totally opposed to anyone’s economic imperialist hegemony.
The MoB just finds it more than passing strange that Baby George Bushmaster is playing Texas Hold’Em with the economic survival of the USE/USSA, not to mention humanity and the planet, by complete, crude reliance on the sword (or should one say the crusade and the jihad?), when a much less lethal and more effective weapon is to hand.
After all, the USE/USSA’s increasingly-strained armed forces have thus far proved incapable of subduing Iraq and Afghanistan, whose populations are respectively only 36 % and 40 % of Iran’s are respectively only 36 % and 40 % the size of Iran’s. Surely this prep school brat of a Connecticut faux-cowboy isn’t so deluded as to imagine that he, a legend in his own mind outstripping even Alexander, can humble Babylon, crush the Persian empire, and march to the ends of the Earth?
Or is there really such madness in the method behind the smirk?
Leverett’s goal is twofold: “meaningful long-term restraints on [Iran’s] nuclear activities” and victory for the USE/USSA in the “longer-term struggle for Iran.”
Leverett proposes a “grand bargain with Iran --- that is, resolution of Washington’s concerns about Tehran’s weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism in return for American security guarantees, and end to sanctions and normalization of diplomatic relations”.
The Museum of the Bourgeois asserts that this is merely more of the same old gangster imperialism of super- and great powers, destined to lead only to more misery and bloodshed.
It’s long past time to reject the rapacious strategies of imperialism, and give the proponents of internationalism and equitable cooperation a chance. There’s only a finite, ever-more-quickly depleting treasure of oil and gas in the Earth, and, when that’s gone, to paraphrase Franklin, if we have not all hung together, we’ll all freeze together in the dark.
_______________________________
Delightfully, 23 June 2006 is the anniversary in 1973 of the Oval Office chat between Richard M. Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, in which they concocted the plan to lure the Director of Central Intelligence into falsely telling the Director of the FBI to back off the Watergate investigation, for reasons of "national security". The revelation of this plot convinced many Republican Members of Congress to at last abandon their support of Nixon.
_______________________________
Today is also the anniversary of the 1912 birth of Alan M. Turing, the great British mathematician, often considered the father of computer science. He killed himself in 1954 by eating a poisoned apple, after persecution by British intelligence agencies for his homosexuality. R.I.P.
Submitted for your consideration: a nation is No. 2 in the world in proven reserves of crude oil, and No. 2 in the world in natural gas reserves. Wouldn’t one think the regime of Warlord W. Bush would be looking for any opportunity to be friends?
Not if the nation is Iran.
As has been previously noted in these pages, Iran has few reasons to trust con-servative Republican American presidents, such as Bush (or con-servative Democratic presidents, such as Carter, for that matter). In 1953, the Eisenhower/J.F. Dulles/A.W. Dulles “axis of evil” overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and re-installed the corrupt dictatorship of “Shah” Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former Nazi sympathizer.
Every president up to and including Carter continued this support, for the “axis of evil” is longitudinal in time as well as in space. This support sufficed until the Revolution of 1979, after which the hard-line faction of the Muslim clergy (the Persian equivalents of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson) triumphed over the secularists, and created their own squalid dictatorship.
Well, when did being a squalid dictatorship ever stop con-servative American presidents from making nice, if there was profit to be had?
Flynt Leverett, former senior director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, published a perceptive essay concerning Iran on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times for 20 June 2006. Leverett and the Museum of the Bourgeois have independently reached many of the same analyses, albeit prescribing different courses of treatment.
As Leverett notes, Iran requires investment of at least $160 billion over the next 25 years in order to convert its oil and gas reserves into salable product. To date, only $15 to $20 billion has been attracted from European and Japanese investors. Guess who’d like to help, and get their hands on the spigots and product?
The People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.
Both the PRC and the RF fear American unilateralism, fear a world in which there truly is only one global superpower, and they are both permanently confined to the second tier, mere regional “great powers”. What if the PRC were to play the RF card, and vice versa? Would an “Islamic Bomb” truly be too much a price for them to pay, if they could divide access to Iran’s buried treasures, and deny them to the USE/USSA (United States Empire/United and Subject States)?
Ironic, isn’t it? A con-servative Republican American president, who should be at the head of the class in seeing the advantages of exercising American economic imperialist hegemony over Iran’s oil and gas (the 21st century way to play the Great Game), can only think of ensuring his place in History by military conquest. (So 19th century. B.C., that is.)
(Richard Nixon seems to have imagined himself as George C. Scott playing at Patton. Does the preening Warlord W. Bush imagine himself as Colin Farrell playing at Alexander?)
Of course, the MoB is totally opposed to anyone’s economic imperialist hegemony.
The MoB just finds it more than passing strange that Baby George Bushmaster is playing Texas Hold’Em with the economic survival of the USE/USSA, not to mention humanity and the planet, by complete, crude reliance on the sword (or should one say the crusade and the jihad?), when a much less lethal and more effective weapon is to hand.
After all, the USE/USSA’s increasingly-strained armed forces have thus far proved incapable of subduing Iraq and Afghanistan, whose populations are respectively only 36 % and 40 % of Iran’s are respectively only 36 % and 40 % the size of Iran’s. Surely this prep school brat of a Connecticut faux-cowboy isn’t so deluded as to imagine that he, a legend in his own mind outstripping even Alexander, can humble Babylon, crush the Persian empire, and march to the ends of the Earth?
Or is there really such madness in the method behind the smirk?
Leverett’s goal is twofold: “meaningful long-term restraints on [Iran’s] nuclear activities” and victory for the USE/USSA in the “longer-term struggle for Iran.”
Leverett proposes a “grand bargain with Iran --- that is, resolution of Washington’s concerns about Tehran’s weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism in return for American security guarantees, and end to sanctions and normalization of diplomatic relations”.
The Museum of the Bourgeois asserts that this is merely more of the same old gangster imperialism of super- and great powers, destined to lead only to more misery and bloodshed.
It’s long past time to reject the rapacious strategies of imperialism, and give the proponents of internationalism and equitable cooperation a chance. There’s only a finite, ever-more-quickly depleting treasure of oil and gas in the Earth, and, when that’s gone, to paraphrase Franklin, if we have not all hung together, we’ll all freeze together in the dark.
_______________________________
Delightfully, 23 June 2006 is the anniversary in 1973 of the Oval Office chat between Richard M. Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, in which they concocted the plan to lure the Director of Central Intelligence into falsely telling the Director of the FBI to back off the Watergate investigation, for reasons of "national security". The revelation of this plot convinced many Republican Members of Congress to at last abandon their support of Nixon.
_______________________________
Today is also the anniversary of the 1912 birth of Alan M. Turing, the great British mathematician, often considered the father of computer science. He killed himself in 1954 by eating a poisoned apple, after persecution by British intelligence agencies for his homosexuality. R.I.P.
posted by HH at 12:26 AM
4 Comments:
Can't resist the old quip about the odious John Foster Dulles: "Dull, duller, Dulles."
My biographies of him are boxed. Can anyone recall the author of above?
According to THE JOHN FOSTER DULLES BOOK OF HUMOR, it was Anthony Eden.
The author's thanks to Mr. Radish for refreshing his memory.
Is not Trotsky the Russian for "radish"?
Isn't a radish what a less than committed Bolshevist was called? Red on the outside, white on the inside.
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