The Real Axis of Evil

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC (retired).

In his State of the Union address back in 2002, George Bush enlightened us on the existence of an "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran and North Korea. These were deemed to be "rogue states" responsible for global terrorism and the haunting spectre of future mass destruction.

Of these three, North Korea is the single, confirmed, on-the-record, in-your-face nuclear weapon wielder - "nyah, nyah, and there's nothing you can do about it Yankee".
Which is of course why the chickenhawks in Washington are ... talking about getting tough. Possibly. One day.

Yep, the desktop bombadiers, so eager to crush an Iraq beleagured by a decade of sanctions, and busily making plans to nuke Iran, are ... doing nothing concrete about North Korea. Why is that I wonder? Heck, its not like they'd have to concoct any artificial pretexts in order to act.

Yet Iraq, whose WMD's proved more illusory than Santa's sleigh was virtually bombed flat. And now Iran is in the neocons' nuclear cross-hairs. Just what is going on? Many conspiracy theorists keep flapping on about "war-for-oil", but the reality may be a little more subtle than that.

It turns out that of the three countries in the so-called "axis of evil", two happen to be oil-producing nations. In 2000, Iraq announced that under the oil-for-food program, it would only accept payment in Euros as opposed to US dollars. After the Iraq war in 2003, the US occupying power stated that payments were being returned to US dollars.
Courageously (in the "Yes Minister" sense), Iran decided late last year that it too would seek payment for oil exports in Euros. It didn't take long for the drums of war to start their insistent beating.

What has North Korea got to do with all this? Bugger all. They are the proverbial red-herring in the publicly stated "axis of evil" configuration. In fact, their place could more readily be taken by Venezuela. That's right, democratic, peace-loving, non-terrorist inspiring Venezuela - which just happens to be a major oil exporter and whose leftist government is being courted by Euro Zone economies to sell oil for euros.

Is it a co-incidence that leader Hugo Chavez has fought off three serious attempts to destabilise his country in the past three years? This journalist doesn't think so. The most recent of these was an abortive coup. Attempts to determine the instigators of the coup have not progressed very far. The CIA never could go past a good coup.

But why does it matter whether oil is sold for dollars or euros? Well it matters a whole bunch if you are the United States of America. To cut a long story short, the US is effectively getting a huge interest free loan out of the rest of the world trading in US dollars. The US can do what no other country can and run massive trade deficits which would cripple any other nation. Since the real lingua-franca of the industrialised (and rapidly industrialising) world is actually oil, any wholesale conversion to euros would mean that the countries buying oil would seek to convert their vast US dollar investments (eg Japan's investments which are almost single-handedly responsible for propping up the American economy), into euro investments. The proof of this thesis is in the ease with which the dollar can be made to tremble when these investors mull their options.

This is the United States' achilles heel. It is the fundamental weakness of this superpower. And instead of addressing the root issues and repairing their economy, instead of preparing to play on a level economic playing field, it is instead wielding its might like the worst schoolyard bully, intimidating its economic opponents into submission.