Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE Highlights of the (not
so) silly season By Pepe
Escobar
overlooked at the height of
the European silly season. It may have been
overlooked at the crowded beaches and restaurants
charging 10 euros for an espresso, but it
registered as a thunderstorm in financial circles
in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels. That was
Beijing saying, with a heavy Mandarin accent:
"Wise up, fella, or your credit is bust." Legions
of desperate Americans are already frantically
advising countrymen to get a
passport and stash some cash.
Foreign governments, institutions and
individuals - most of them Asian, European and
Arab - hold collectively more than $2 trillion of
US paper. That's roughly 25% of the US national
debt. China's central bank is more than ready to
exchange a great deal of its gargantuan $1
trillion-plus in reserves for gold and oil.
The Bush-friendly "new Europe" of the
current Sarkozy-Merkel vintage of course knows
that voracious US Treasuries buyer China de facto
controls US interest rates, so China literally
pays for Bush's war on Iraq. "New Europe" also
knows it's absolutely unlikely China would ever
finance a Bush war on Iran - which would be a
direct attack on Asia. More power thus to a
negotiated European-brokered solution to the
Iranian nuclear dossier.
A final
solution? It all goes back to the Middle
East. The original plan in essence boiled down to
borrowing from China to invade and occupy Iraq.
Controlling a vital source of oil, Washington
would then control the Beijing bull by the horns.
The problem is the Bush administration has
(mis)managed to control virtually nothing in Iraq,
while China can always get the oil it needs from
somewhere else (Iran, Kazakhstan, Venezuela,
anywhere in Africa). So the winner of the war on
Iraq is ... Halliburton.
Iran meanwhile
insists on doing nothing to improve its public
relations. This may not necessarily emanate from
the clerical establishment: it is clearly linked
to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his Republican
Guard gang ensconced in key ministries. A new,
violent wave of internal repression is on,
including arbitrary arrests of students and
unionized workers, bleak warnings on state TV, and
even a stoning related to an adultery case.
The current hardcore crackdown on
pernicious Western influence has included
forbidding women to ride bicycles. More seriously,
Emadeddin Baghi - one of the great contemporary
Iranian intellectuals - has been condemned to
three years in jail, accused of "actions against
national security" and "propaganda in favor of
regime opponents". The Elysee Palace - home of
King Sarko the First, as he is known by diehard
French monarchists - has expressed its "serious
preoccupation" with the affair. No "serious
preoccupation" has been expressed toward waves of
paperless immigrants now equaled under new Sarko
police rules to delinquents and even criminals -
including many Chinese as well as those African
chaps selling mini-towers in front of the Eiffel
Tower.
I had the honor of interviewing
Baghi for Asia Times Online in September 2005 in
Tehran (The humanist reformer).
His "actions against national security" and his
"propaganda in favor of regime opponents" consist
in running an apolitical non-governmental
organization to defend prisoners' rights. In his
last e-mail to friends in Europe and the United
States (should we all be pursued by an Islamic
court and go to jail as well?), Baghi said he is
"ready to pay the price even in prison".
The whole of Baghdad, meanwhile, already
languishes in prison - a gulag at 53 degrees
Celsius with no water and electricity. An ATol
reader from California, born in the Middle East,
has come up with as good a definitive solution as
any to the oil and water wars in the region.
Instead of moving millions of Shi'ites and Sunnis
to a "Shi'iteistan" and a "Sunnistan", he suggests
moving all Iraqis to Israel, and all Israelis -
including Likud Party members - to Iraq, and
rename the new country "Likudstan", with an
adjacent body of water (the Likud Gulf) with its
own Brookings Institution.
"The big bonus
for all of us," he writes, is that "Likudstan
(formerly Israel) will be Iran's next-door
neighbor; it will be much easier to ask the
Likudies to drop nukes on Iran. We don't even have
to send brother [Donald] Rumsfeld to supply them
with weapons of mass destruction, since the
Likudies are self-sufficient." Maybe
Iraq-war-eraser Sarko could discuss this one with
Bush the next time they meet under a Chinese-owned
Eiffel Tower.
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