ANALYSIS:

The Bourse Conspiracy

Our Intervention in the Middle East May Be Fueled by a Motive Most Mundane

Is the US serious about making preemptive bombing strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities? Worse, is there any truth to Internet alarms that the US plans to attack sites like the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz with tactical "mini" nukes?

On the other hand, burned by Iraq, will the US settle for sabotage and commando raids? Or is the administration's saber-rattling just psy ops, as some suspect, designed to put the fear of Allah in Iran?

Most of all, why, if Iran is ten years away from a bomb, the urgency? Reaching into its grab bag of rationales--[Your nation's name here] backed terror, stockpiled WMDs, and/or committed human rights abuses--does the US seek to seize the reins of yet another state's oil industry?

Or, as was speculated before the Iraq invasion, perhaps the administration's desire to secure an uninterrupted oil supply for the US is secondary to that of securing profits for oil companies. In other words, it's not about the oil, it's about the oil business.

But as Krassimir Petrov, Ph.D. pointed out on GlobalResearch.org before Iraq, US seizure of its oil fields was unnecessary because we "could simply print dollars for nothing and use them to get all the oil in the world [we need]."

The key word is "dollars." Recall Neocon contempt toward "Old" Europe. Perhaps it masks a fear that, however bedeviled by fanatical Islamists, Europe is beginning to rival us in strength. Though its accumulated military pales beside ours, Europe wields its power via the euro, now almost as almighty as the dollar.

First, however, consider the title of a recent piece of Dr. Petrov's: "The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse." What in the name of God and Allah is a bourse?

It has a poetic ring: "Emerging from the wood, we burst upon a bluebell-strewn bourse." Though French and melodic, like arbitrage and tranche, it's a business term meaning stock exchange, as in France's Federation Internationale des Bourses de Valeurs. And, like the bomb, Iran wants one.

Dealing oil securities, an Iranian bourse, according to Dr. Petrov, would provide serious competition for New York's NYMEX and London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE). Its currency of choice, of course, would be the euro.

Revisiting the recent past, prior to our invasion, was Iraq too going euro? Indeed, Saddam Hussein had decided to make euros the currency of choice for his Food for Oil program in November 2000. Lt. Col. (Retired) Karen Kwiatkowski, former Pentagon and NSA staffer, among others, maintained this was a prime reason for the US invasion.

William Clark, the author of Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar, concurred: "The Real Reason [sic] for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard."

What difference does it make what currency a state transacts in?

Travel back to America's Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt's response to deficits was to print more money than there was gold to back it up. Stripped of true value, the dollar was condemned to depreciate and the economy left vulnerable to inflation.

According to Petrov, the world needed a reason to acquire the dollar and, in the early seventies, Saudi Arabia provided one, when, in exchange for US military protection, it agreed to accept only dollars for oil. The dollar may no longer have been as good as gold, but it was now good as black gold.

"If someone demanded a different payment [for oil]," Dr. Petrov writes, "he had to be convinced, either by political or military pressure, to change his mind." That certain someone [Saddam] was convinced all right--if not to deal in dollars, to steal all he could before high-tailing it out of his presidential palaces. It didn't take long for President Bush to sign an executive order switching Iraqi oil back to the dollar.

But, petro- or not, the dollar depreciated anyway, thanks to our debt. Nations like China and Japan can scarcely be faulted for seeking to unhitch their wagons from our falling star. Should they choose to switch to euros, their crash landing would be softened by the proposed Iranian bourse.

A former director of the IPE, Chris Cook, actually tried to help Iran set up a bourse, though due to internecine conflicts he was unsuccessful. In an article on Asia Times Online, he discounted US fear of the euro. "It is with wry amusement" that he regards the "genesis of this 'Iran bourse' project [as] a wish to subvert the US dollar by denominating oil pricing in euros."

Calling it "merely a transactional issue," he claims that what "matters is in what assets. . . these proceeds are then invested." Sounds obvious, but Cook's brief would have been better served were it less, well, brief and his tone less high-handed.

In addition to the bourse, Cook also recommends establishing a new--and though he doesn't say, presumably higher--Persian Gulf "benchmark oil price." Apparently we're meant to conclude he would have undertaken neither of these ventures if what's good for the goose weren't good for the gander.

Clark, however, maintains that pre-Iraq, in an "incredibly bold" move, the administration planned to use the war on terror as a pretext to halt the spread of euros and undercut OPEC by flooding the market with Iraqi oil to reduce the price.

After all, he writes, if the world acted in unison and abandoned the dollar--"America's preeminent, inescapable Achilles Heel," he calls it--our economy would be devastated.

Meanwhile, Cook's thesis is reinforced by an in-depth article for the Center for Contemporary Conflict by Robert Looney, professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He dismisses the idea that the administration throws roadblocks in the way of the euro as "little more than another web-based conspiracy theory."

Looney maintains that it's unlikely that (1.) OPEC could arrive at the consensus needed to switch currencies; (2.) the consequences of devaluing the dollar would be too great for any country to try it; and (3.) the appreciation of the euro won't last forever.

Besides, Looney believes dethroning the dollar as the dominant international reserve currency isn't even that damaging ("around 0.5%") to the US gross domestic product. Clark begs to differ, declaring that should OPEC go euro, "There'd surely be a run on the banks much like the 1930s."

That Looney's analysis is no less comprehensive than Petrov's or Clark's makes it that much more difficult for the layman to determine if US hostilities toward Iraq and Iran are euro-based. However, if the administration is truly trying to prevent oil from being transacted in euros, it's a desperate holding action to stall gathering worldwide momentum toward the euro.

But does it really matter if the Bourse Conspiracy (apologies to author Robert Ludlum) is real? Amidst all the false pretexts, Bush & Co., like a husband and wife who can't remember why they started arguing, may actually have lost sight of their original motive for intervention. In fact, at the end of the day, one can't help but conclude that the administration asserts its hegemony simply because it can.