“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” – George Orwell
The key to it all is the fiat currency for trading oil.
Under an OPEC agreement, all oil has been traded in US dollars since 1971 (after the dropping of the gold standard) which makes the US dollar the de facto major international trading currency. The European Union is the only challenger to the USA’s economic position, and it created the euro to challenge the dollar in international markets.
In 1999, Iraq, with the world’s second largest oil reserves, switched to trading its oil in euros. America thought this was funny at first; Iraq had just made a mistake that was going to cost a lot of lost revenue. Two years later, the laughter turned hollow; the Euro was rising against the dollar, Iraq had given itself a huge economic free kick by switching.
Iran started thinking about switching; Venezuela began cutting out the dollar by bartering oil with Cuba & others. Russia ramped up oil production with Europe (trading in Euros). The dollar was losing its grip on oil trading and consequently on world trade in general. If America did not stamp on this immediately, this economic paradigm shift was capable of consuming the US economy and its dominance of world trade.
The USA’s real economic condition is about as bad as it could be;
The U.S. is the most debt-ridden nation on earth, owing about US$15,000 for every single one of it’s 300 million men, women and children.
Even if OPEC did not switch to euros wholesale the US’s difficulties would build. Even if only a small part of the oil trade went euro, that would increase the attractiveness to EU members of joining the ‘eurozone’, which in turn would make the euro stronger and make it more attractive to oil nations as a trading currency and to other nations as a general trading currency.
America’s response to the euro threat was predictable. It came out fighting. The illegal Iraq invasion sent a very clear message to any other oil producers just what will happen to them if they do not stay in the dollar circle. This was to be a severe setback to the European Union and its euro, the only trading bloc and currency strong enough to attack the USA’s dominance of world trade through the dollar. Locking the world back into dollar oil trading would consolidate America’s current position and make it all but impregnable as the dominant world power — economically and militarily.
A splintered Europe and its euro would suffer a serious setback and might take decades to recover. The US diplomats worked hard for over a decade to split Europe on many issues, most notably Iraq; Britain was easy, but other Europeans offered opposition to the US in terms of UN votes.
It is the boldest grab for absolute power the world has seen in modern times. America is hardly likely to allow the possible slaughter of a few hundred thousand Arabs stand between it and world domination.
President Bush did promise to “protect the American way of life.”
This is what he meant.
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