An Act of Economic Madness

…A recent piece by energy expert Michael Klare, “Entering the Tough Oil Era,” at Tomdispatch.com offers perhaps the crucial context within which to consider Cheney’s urge to launch an air assault on Iran. If we are, as Klare writes, leaving the realms of “easy oil” extracted from the most accessible places in the least unstable and least troubled of countries, and entering a new era of “oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places,” if global oil supplies are already under intense pressure and oil prices ready to leap on any hint of possible oil disaster anywhere on the planet, then imagine what a major air assault on Iran before January 2009 might mean for the global economy.


Actually, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates helped us imagine just this at his confirmation hearings back in December 2006 when asked about the effects of such an attack: “It’s always awkward to talk about hypotheticals in this case. But I think that while Iran cannot attack us directly militarily, I think that their capacity to potentially close off the Persian Gulf to all exports of oil, their potential to unleash a significant wave of terror both in the — well, in the Middle East and in Europe and even here in this country is very real.”

Such an attack would, of course, be a straightforward act of global economic madness; but, given the cast of characters–a classic neocon quip of the pre-Iraq invasion period was “”Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran…”–that hardly takes the possibility off the hypothetical “table” where all “options” so obdurately remain. Think global meltdown after any administration air assault on Iran and you’re likely to be in the economic ballpark. Then buckle your seatbelt. We’re entering a hair-raising age.

The Nation