http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20EN20060310&articleId=2076
No, the Iran Oil Bourse is not a casus belli.
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, March 10, 2006
A number of writings have recently appeared with the thesis that the
announced plans of the Teheran government to institute a Teheran Oil Bourse,
perhaps as early as this month, is the real hidden reason behind the evident
march to war on Iran from the Anglo-American powers. The thesis is in our
opinion mistaken for many reasons, not the least, that war on Iran has been in
planning since the 1990's, as an integral part of the US Greater Middle East
strategy.
More significantly, the Oil Bourse argument is a Red Herring that diverts
attention from the real geopolitical grounds behind the march towards war which
have been detailed on this website, including my piece, 'Calculating the Risk
of War in Iran' which was posted on GlobalResearch.ca on January 29, 2006
In 1996, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, two neo-conservatives later to
play an important role in formulation of Bush Administration Pentagon policy in
the Middle East, authored a paper for then-newly-elected Israeli Prime
Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. That advisory paper, 'A Clean Break: a New
Strategy for Securing the Realm,' called on Netanyahu to make a 'clean break
from the peace process.' They also called on Netanyahu to strengthen Israel's
defenses to better confront Syria and Iraq, and to go after Iran as the prop of
Syria.
More than a year before President Bush declared Operation Shock and Awe
against Iraq, he made his now infamous January 2002 State of the Union address
to Congress in which he labelled Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as the
'Axis of Evil' trio. This was well before anyone in Teheran was even
considering establishing an oil bourse to trade oil in various currencies.
The argument by those who believe that the Teheran Oil Bourse would be
the casus belli, the trigger pushing Washington down the road to potential
thermonuclear annihilation of Iran, seems to rest on the claim that by openly
trading oil to other nations or buyers in Euros, Teheran would set into motion
a chain of events in which nation after nation, buyer after buyer, would line
up to buy oil no longer in US dollars but in Euros. That in turn, so goes the
argument, would lead to a panic selling of dollars on world foreign exchange
markets and a collapse of the role of the dollar as reserve currency, one of
the 'pillars of Empire.' Basta! There goes the American Century down the tubes
with the onset of the Teheran Oil Bourse.Reality is a little different.
Some background considerations
That argument fails to convince for a number of reasons. First, in the
case of at least one of the Oil Bourse theory writers, their argument is based
on a misunderstanding of the process which I described in my book, A Century of
War, regarding the creation in 1974 of 'petrodollar recycling' in the wake of
the orchestrated 400% OPEC oil price hike, a process with which then-US
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was deeply involved.
The dollar then did not become a 'petrodollar' although Kissinger spoke
about the process of 'recycling petrodollars.' Instead what he referred to was
the initiation of a new phase of US global hegemony in which the 'petrodollar'
export earnings of OPEC oil lands would be recycled into the hands of the major
New York and London banks and re-lent in form of dollar loans to oil deficit
countries like Brazil or Argentina, creating what soon came to be known as he
Latin American Debt Crisis.
The dollar at that time had been a fiat currency since August 1971 when
President Richard Nixon first abrogated the Bretton Woods Treaty and refused to
redeem US dollars held by foreign central banks for gold bullion. The dollar
floated against other major currencies, falling more or less until it was
revived by the turbo change of the 1973-4 oil price shock.
What the 1973 oil shock achieved for the sagging dollar was a sudden
injection of global demand from nations confronted with 400% higher oil import
bills. At that time, by postwar convention and convenience, as the dollar was
the only reserve currency held around the world other than gold, oil was priced
by all OPEC members in dollars as a practical exigency.
With the 400% price rise, nations such as France, Germany, Japan and
other importers suddenly found reason to try to buy their oil directly in their
own currencies-French Franc, German Deutschemarks or Japanese Yen-in order to
lessen the pressure on their rapidly declining reserves of trade dollars. The
US Treasury and Pentagon made certain that did not happen, partly with some
Kissinger secret diplomacy, bullying threats, and a whopping big US military
agreement with the key OPEC producer, Saudi Arabia. At that time it helped that
the late Shah of Iran was seen in Washington to be a vassal of Kissinger.
The point was not that the dollar became a 'petro' currency. The point
was that the reserve status of the dollar, now a paper currency, was bolstered
by the 400% increase in world demand for dollars to buy oil. But that was only
a part of the dollar story. In 1979, following the accession to power of the
Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, oil prices shot through the roof for the second
time in six years. Yet, paradoxically, later that year the dollar began a
precipitous free-fall, not rise. It was no 'petrodollar.'
Foreign dollar holders began dumping their dollars as a protest to the
foreign policies of the Jimmy Carter Administration. It was to deal with that
dollar crisis that Carter was forced to bring in Paul Volcker to head the
Federal Reserve in 1979. In October 1979 Volcker gave the dollar another
turbo-charge by allowing interest rates in the US to rise some 300% in weeks,
to well over 20%. That in turn forced global interest rates through the roof,
triggered a global recession, mass unemployment and misery. It also 'saved' the
dollar as sole reserve currency. The dollar was not a 'petrodollar.' It was the
currency of issue of the greatest Superpower, a superpower determined to do
what it needed to keep it that way.
The F-16 dollar backing
Since 1979 the US power establishment from Wall Street to Washington has
maintained the status of the dollar as unchallenged global reserve currency.
The role, however, is not a purely economic one. Reserve currency status is an
adjunct of global power, of the US determination to dominate other nations and
the global economic process. The US didn't get reserve currency status by a
democratic vote of world central banks, nor did the British Empire in the 19th
Century. They fought wars for it.
For that reason, the status of the dollar as reserve currency depends on
the status of the United States as the world's unchallenged military
superpower. In a sense, since August 1971 the dollar is no longer backed by
gold. Instead, it is backed by F-16's and MI Abrams battle tanks, operating in
some 130 US bases around the world, defending liberty and the dollar.
A Euro challenge?
In order for the Euro to begin to challenge the reserve role of the US
dollar a virtual revolution in policy would have to take place in Euroland.
First the European Central Bank, the institutionalized, undemocratic
institution created by the Maastricht Treaty in order to maintain the power of
creditor banks in collecting their debts, would have to surrender power to
elected legislators. It would then have to turn on the Euro printing presses
and print Euros like there was no tomorrow. That is because the current size of
the publicly-traded Euroland government bond market is still tiny in comparison
with the huge US Treasury market.
As Michael Hudson explains in his brilliant and too-little studied work,
'Super Imperialism,' the peverse genius of the US global dollar hegemony was
the realization, in the months after August 1971, that US power under a fiat
dollar system was directly tied to the creation of dollar debt. The debt and US
trade deficit was not the 'problem,' they realized. It was the 'solution.'
The US could print endless quantities of dollars to pay for foreign
imports of Toyotas, Hondas, BMW's or other goods in a system in which the
trading partners of the USA, holding paper dollars for their exports feared for
a dollar collapse enough to continue to support the dollar by buying US
Treasury bonds and bills. In fact in the thirty years since abandoning gold
exchange for paper dollars, the US dollars in reserve have risen by a whopping
2,500% and grows at double-digit rates today.
This system continued into the 1980's and 1990's unchallenged. US policy
was one of crisis management coupled with skilful and coordinated projection of
US military power. Japan in the 1980's, fearful of antagonizing its US nuclear
umbrella provider, bought endless volumes of US Treasury debt even though they
lost a King's ransom in the process. It was a political, not an investment
decision.
The only potential challenge to the reserve role of the dollar came in
the late 1990's with the European Union decision to create a single currency,
the Euro, to be administered by single central bank, the ECB. Europe appeared
to be emerging as a unified, independent policy voice of what Chirac then
called a multi-polar world. Those multi-polar illusions vanished with the
unpublicized decision of the ECB and national central banks not to pool their
gold reserves as backing for the new Euro. That decision not to use gold as
backing came amid a heated controversy over Nazi gold and alleged wartime
abuses by Germany, Switzerland, France and other European countries.
Since the shocks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing declaration of a
US global War on Terror, including a unilateral decision to ignore the United
Nations and the community of nations and go to war against a defenceless Iraq,
few countries have even dared to challenge the dollar hegemony. The combined
defense spending of all nations of the EU today pales by comparison to the
total of current US budgeted and unbudgeted defense spending. US defense
outlays will reach an official, staggering level of $663 billion in the current
Fiscal 2007 year. The combined EU spending amounts to a mere $75 billion, with
tendency declining, in part owing to ECB Maastricht deficit pressures on its
governments.
So today, at least for the present, there are no signs of Japanese, EU or
other dollar holders engaging in dollar asset liquidation. Even China, unhappy
as she is with Washington bully politics, seems reluctant to rouse the American
dragon to fury.
The Origins of the Oil Bourse
The idea of creating a new trading platform in Iran to trade oil and to
create a new oil benchmark crude apparently originated with the former Director
of the London International Petroleum Exchange, Chris Cook. In a January 21
article in the Asia Times, Cook explained the background. Describing a letter
he had written in 2001 to the Governor of the Iranian Central Bank, Dr Mohsen
Nourbakhsh, Cook explained what he advised then:
'In this letter I pointed out that the structure of global oil markets
massively favors intermediary traders and particularly investment banks, and
that both consumers and producers such as Iran are adversely affected by this.
I recommended that Iran consider as a matter of urgency the creation of a
Middle Eastern energy exchange, and particularly a new Persian Gulf benchmark
oil price.
'It is therefore with wry amusement that I have seen a myth being widely
propagated on the Internet that the genesis of this "Iran bourse" project is a
wish to subvert the US dollar by denominating oil pricing in euros.
'As anyone familiar with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries will know, the denomination of oil sales in currencies other than the
dollar is not a new subject, and as anyone familiar with economics will tell
you, the denomination of oil sales is merely a transactional issue: what
matters is in what assets (or, in the case of the United States, liabilities )
these proceeds are then invested.'
A full challenge to the domination of the dollar as world central bank
reserve currency entails a de facto declaration of war on the 'full spectrum
dominance' of the United States today. The mighty members of the European
Central Bank Council well know this. The heads of state of every EU country
know that. The Chinese leadership as well as Japanese and Indian know that. So
does Vladimir Putin.
Until some combination of those Eurasian powers congeal in a cohesive
challenge to the unbridled domination of the USA as sole superpower, there will
be no Euro or Yen or even Chinese Yuan challenging the role of the dollar. The
issue is of enormous importance, as it is vital to understand the true dynamics
bringing the world to the brink of possible nuclear catastrophe today.
As a small ending note, a good friend in Oslo recently forwarded me an
article from the Norwegian press. At the end of December, Sven Arild Andersen,
Director of the Oslo Bourse, announced he was fed up with depending on the
London oil bourse trading oil in dollars. Norway, a major oil producer, selling
most of its oil into Euro countries in the EU, he said, should set up its own
oil bourse and trade its oil in Euros. Will NATO member Norway become the next
target for the wrath of the Pentagon?
* F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Contributing Editor and author
of the book, 'A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World
Order,' Pluto Press Ltd. He may be contacted through his website,
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl
