The biggest threat to the U.S. and the West is very likely not a nuclear armed Iran; it’s the dumping of the dollar. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S. and its axis of empire has enacted and maintained a stringent hegemonic policy of controlling the world’s oil reserves, which are rapidly being depleted. The entire fiat debt-based U.S. economy is suspended by the petrol-dollar. Under the latest rubric of imperial expansion and global hegemony, “combating” global terrorism, that is to say terrorism which is not carried out by the U.S. and its allies, state-sponsored or otherwise, has been continually used as a pretext to militarize the world in order to ensure the petrol-dollar remains arbitrarily buoyant. Two-thirds of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves are in the Western Asia region of the Middle East, namely, in order of magnitude, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.
Before delving further, a brief history lesson by Tom Engelhardt is pertinent.
Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry.In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police.He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf — until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring.In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.[1]
The imperial aggression and terrorism against Iran, namely by the U.S., and certainly its client-state Israel, and perhaps to a much lesser degree the U.K. et al., is disturbing, and further verification, as if it were needed, that the foreign policy of the U.S. is utterly insane and homicidal. Essentially, the West’s ongoing campaign of punishment against Iran, (similar to that of a mafia don punishing anyone stepping out of line), for its suspected nuclear weapons program––which contrary to corporate U.S.-West propaganda is not the only reason for their aggression, nor even the most important reason, for it should be remembered that the U.S. brokered the purchase of a 5-megawatt research reactor for Iran in 1967––has reached dangerous new heights. Indeed overt acts of war have been committed against Iran as of late, coinciding with the ongoing covert war with Iran. To give one example of the self-justified and unmentioned history of U.S. terrorism against Iran, which unsurprisingly receives virtually zero media coverage within the context of current developments, “in [July] 1988, a missile cruiser…the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing 290 civilians including 66 children.”