THE ROVING
EYE Real
cowards go to Tehran By Pepe
Escobar
Imagine the classic United States
neo-conservative wet dream; staring at Iran on a
map and salivating about the crossroads between
Europe and Asia, between the Arab world and the
Indian subcontinent, between the Arabian Sea and
Central Asia, with 10% of the world's proven oil
reserves (over 150 billion barrels) and 15% of
proven gas reserves - an energy complex bigger
than Saudi Arabia and arbiter of the energy routes
from the Persian Gulf to the West and Asia via the
Strait of Hormuz.
It's like a pudgy
armchair action man mesmerized by a nimble lap
dancer. I'm gonna make you mine, honey. It's
regime change time, gotta snuff out the owner of
this joint. Otherwise, people will
start talking; what kind
of chicken global hegemon is this?
So the
neo-cons got their New Year's Eve Barack Obama
administration's Iran sanctions/embargo package,
duly replicated by the European poodle parade. But
it was not supposed to be like this. The lap
dancer leapt from the stage and applied a neck
scissors on the armchair action man; he's
suffocating, not her. The whole thing is ...
misfiring! Just like the latest neo-con Big Idea -
the invasion, occupation and inevitable defeat in
Iraq, to the tune of more than US$1 trillion.
Baby, sanction me one more time
Let's review some of the latest evidence.
Tehran has just sent two of its warships through
the Suez Canal towards the Mediterranean; they
docked at the Syrian port of Tartus - no less. Not
so long ago, disgraced dictator and close House of
Saud pal Hosni Mubarak would have probably bombed
them.
Tehran cut off oil exports to the
top European war poodles, Britain and France.
That's only 1% of British imports and 4% of
France's imports - but the message was clear; if
the depressed Club Med countries insist on
following Anglo-French warmongering, they're next.
Brent crude is hitting $121 a barrel - an
eight-month high. West Texas Intermediate, traded
in New York, is hovering around $105. Brent is
crucial, because it sets the consumer price for
gasoline in most of the US and Western Europe. The
neo-cons swore on their Bibles and Torahs there
would be no oil spike. It happened - like
clockwork, proving once again their knowledge of
market speculation is of a two-year-old (no
offense to lovely two-year-olds).
The
funds Tehran is losing because of the sanctions -
in terms of less exports to Europe - are being
largely compensated by the oil-price spike caused
by the neo-con-driven warmongering. On top of it,
Tehran is bound to sell more oil to its top Asian
clients - China, India, Japan and South Korea, and
even Turkey, all of whom, with varying degrees of
diplomacy, have told Washington to mind its own
business.
As Asia Times Online had
advanced, it took some time but Iran and China
have just closed a new oil pricing deal. And the
Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline is a definitive go. And
Afghanistan and Pakistan - as well as Iran - badly
want to be admitted at the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO), accelerating regional economic
integration.
The fact that the Israel
lobby drafters of the sanctions package couldn't
foresee any of this proves once again they live
the vegetative life of armchair "action" men.
Neo-con parrots are left to the "sanctions
are biting" blah blah blah. Or to State Department
spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, married to neo-con
Robert Kagan, assuring pressure is being put on
all these countries so they may do "what they can
to increase sanctions, particularly to wean
themselves from Iranian crude". Nobody is
"weaning" from anything - apart from the
self-defeating European poodles.
Also
exposed is the myth of Saudi spare capacity. There
is none. Saudi reserves are falling at a rate of
3% a year (it's exporting 11.8 million barrels a
day, and falling). Moreover, the House of Saud
does not want to pump more oil; it needs high oil
prices to bribe its own population out of noxious
Arab Spring ideas.
Then there's the
strawberry on the cheesecake, too delicious to
pass up. Goldman Sachs has just placed Iran as one
of the "Next 11" in the developing world after the
BRICS, only one among five developing nations with
above average "productivity and sustainability of
growth". Perhaps a Persian Britney Spears should
be singing "Baby, sanction me one more time."
Baby, I'm coming to get ya From
the point of view of Washington, the only thing
that really counts in the interminable nuclear
charade is whether Iran may reach the ability to
build a nuclear weapon in record time in case the
leadership in Tehran is absolutely sure the
US/Israel axis will attack.
That's exactly
what Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper told the US Senate Armed Services
Committee last Thursday; Iran is "more than
capable of producing enough highly-enriched
uranium for a weapon if its political leaders -
specifically the Supreme Leader himself - chooses
to do so."
What Clapper didn't specify is
that Tehran is enriching uranium to a paltry 3.5%;
a nuclear bomb needs 95% - and that would be
immediately detected by the International Atomic
Energy Agency. If that happens - and that's a
major if - there's no way regime change from the
outside may be imposed. Thus bye bye to the Big
Prize in oil and gas coveted by anyone from
realist Dr Zbig Brzezinski to former Darth Vader,
Dick Cheney.
So it's Ouroboros all over
again - the serpent biting its own tail. We
need to bomb to get regime change, so that oily
dancer will dance on our wealthy lap.
The problem is neither the Obama
administration nor key Pentagon generals are
convinced this is a good deal.
Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E
Dempsey, thinks, "It would be premature to
exclusively decide that the time for a military
option was upon us."
And Lieutenant
General Ronald Burgess, director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, told Congress last Thursday,
"Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally
provoke a conflict." No wonder; Dempsey himself
admitted that the leadership in Tehran - contrary
to relentless neo-con media spin - "is a rational
actor".
Does this all matter for the
neo-cons and their legion of media shills? Not
really. Until they find a sucker to fight a war
for them - as in a Republican US president - real
cowards will keep going to Tehran, all day and all
of the night, in their wettest of wet dreams.
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