Reasons to be cheerful pt3

I was chatting with a couple of customers in my brother’s cafe yesterday. The shutters were half down and my brother was winding up for the day. The radio was on and somebody on a news show was talking about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. I chipped in with something like ‘you know what this is all about don’t you?’

My brother replied with something along the lines of

‘It’s because the Iranians are starting to sell their oil in Euros instead of dollars’

I was pretty surprised. My brother works hard in a shop all day and certainly does not have time to browse through alternative new sources. I asked him…

‘Where did you get that from? Not from the newspapers surely?’

‘No, some old bloke phoned in and talked about it on a chat show on the radio a few days ago’

I laughed.

He had me going for a moment. For a second, I almost thought that the newspapers had been doing their job.

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Our media has been working hard on moulding public opinion on Iran for some time now. Last October we were being told about how those naughty Iranians had been supplying special bombs to Iraqi insurgents. Special bombs that were being used to kill and maim British troops in Basra.

Tony Blair and Jack straw made public speeches on the subject and explicitly accused elements of the Iranian government of being involved.

A few news sources even reported that British Intelligence was putting a dossier together. A dossier! Goody, we like those.

Per the Scotsman…

A TEAM of military specialists has been dispatched to Iraq to compile a comprehensive dossier of evidence that "Iranian elements" have been arming insurgents engaged in a brutal struggle with British forces around Basra.

The Foreign Office last night confirmed that experts were engaged in an intensive operation to back up growing concerns that Iran is "interfering" to deadly effect in efforts to pacify Iraq and restore democracy to the war-torn country.

The insistence that Britain is determined to prove Iran is providing sophisticated equipment to perpetrators of attacks that have claimed the lives of at least eight British soldiers in the past five months is a significant development in the escalating war of words between London and Tehran.

Now it turns out, per the Independent, that…

MPs and soldiers' families have demanded an explanation from the Government after a U-turn over claims that Iran was complicit in the killing of British soldiers in southern Iraq. Britain has dropped the charge of Iranian involvement after senior officials had repeatedly accused the Tehran regime of supplying sophisticated explosive devices to insurgents. Government officials now acknowledge that there is no evidence, or even reliable intelligence, connecting the Iranian government to the infra-red triggered bombs which have killed 10 British soldiers in the past eight months.

Naturally, the retraction of the accusation has been given a lot less coverage than the original accusation and there are countless saps out there still thinking that Iran was responsible for blowing up British squaddies.

The funniest part is that the special bombs in question were actually designed by the British security forces.

Hmmmm, intriguing

The special bomb story is just part of a wider pattern of misinformation and deceit. The public musings of the Iranian president have been given a tremendous amount of coverage and have been widely misreported. Every few days a story crops up somewhere that the Iranians are buying, building or fantasizing about nuclear missiles.

The sources are never clearly identified and no evidence presented.

And we are constantly being deceived about the motivations behind, significance of and progress of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme.

The papers keep printing this crap though.

And let’s not forget the recent upsurge in stories warning us that a new major terrorist attack is certain and possibly imminent. There has been a subtle but noticeable increase in output over the last few weeks. Fuck me, even Osama has come out of semi-retirement with a new webcast.

Well, we’re told it’s Osama, we’re told it’s new. The CIA says so and the CIA always tells the truth.

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The one hot Iranian story our media seems reluctant to talk about is that the Iranians are planning to sell their oil in Euros rather than dollars.

Given that the American government is eight trillion dollars in debt and printing money like there’s no tomorrow that could be a small problem for them.

Ensuring that people need to hold your currency to buy oil is a major prop to a currency and avoids actually having to produce anything yourself that people might want to buy.

The news that gold prices have hit a 25 year high as informed investors pile out of the dollar and dollar assets is, I’m sure, entirely coincidental

Of course, the last big oil exporter to switch oil trading from dollars to Euros was, erm, Iraq just before we blew the crap out of it.

There’s a subtle point here that has been deliberately withheld from most people. Oil itself is not necessarily the motivation for manufactured wars and foreign interventions. The currency used to buy that oil is arguably of much greater significance,

The Internet has been buzzing with the Iranian Oil Bourse story and the relevance it may or may not have to a potential attack on Iran. However, I’m mindful of the Iran-Contra affair when the Reagan administration was knowingly selling arms to Iran at a time when it was supposedly a mortal enemy. Who’s to say what is really going on right now?

But the point is our media is not even touching the bourse story and uncritically parroting any old crap our governments and unattributed sources feed them and right now everything is pointing towards an attack on Iran and possibly a justification for that attack in the form of a major terrorist incident.

So, what’s going on here? Are the people in charge and their mouthpieces stupid or wicked? Or maybe they’re wickedly stupid? As things stand we poor Muppets out there lose either way. Either we get involved in another war – and don’t forget the Russians and Chinese have interests in Iran, or we leave the Iranians alone, they fuck the dollar and our debt-ridden economies in the UK and US tip over like dominoes.

It’s looking like a no win situation from here.

2006 is definitely shaping up to be a red letter year

The Iranians start trading oil in Euros on the 20^th March.