Iran attack 2008: why it's in the pipeline

We will paint an attack within Iran as heroically saving the Middle East from its own unravelling, the mutually assured destruction of two middle eastern nuclear powers (Israel and, all too soon, Iran) ... but the reality will be much simpler.

We are the playground bully who, having eaten his sandwiches before 11am, reasons that the skinny guys (whose food we now snatch) only have their own stupid selves to blame for not eating earlier.

UK and US homegrown oil production has peaked.

The attack will be about new business opportunities, about feeding the monster of never ending economic growth to which our politics is ideologically wedded. It will be about the mouth-watering dream of restoring the levels of business profitability not enjoyed since the Iranian pre-revolutionary days of the despotic Shah, or pre-1951 when the Iranian government made do with royalties of between 10 and 12 per cent of net proceeds for its oil exports.*1

Its about settling old scores and restoring our corporate primacy.

You see, we’ve been here before.

In the early 1950s the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company AIOC, later renamed British Petroleum, was in control of Iran's primary source of income: oil. It was only when the relatively democratic Musaddiq government attempted to nationalise Iran's oil industry in 1951 that Iran stopped being the perfect partner.

According to Mark Curtis' Web of Deceit the UK responded to the threat of reduced profits by applying pressure in ways which may now seem surprisingly familiar. Planners started with economic pressure, by bringing Iran's oil exports to a standstill, thus hitting its government's income. Then we funded destabilising mercenary mobs and attempted to get US backing for direct military action. Finally we settled on the strong man solution, returning the Shah to Iran in a CIA backed coup resulting in a period of martial law.*3

The Shah, who Henry Kissinger applauded as 'an unconditional ally', opened the way for the new oil deal of 1953, which gave Britain and the US each a 40% interest in Iranian oil, leaving... 20% for the Iranians.

Is it likely that Iran has forgotten the deal which resulted following the last UK/US intervention? And, is it any wonder, therefore, that the Iranians are looking to expand their energy portfolio or to develop a powerful deterrent?

Ends | 6 Feb 2007 | The Leg

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Notes:
1. At the same time the British government received as much as 30 per cent in taxes alone.
2. The US cut was the price Britain secretly agreed to pay the US in exchange for US help in overthrowing Musaddiq.
3. Freedom-loving Iranians didn’t do so well by the deal. By 1975, Amnesty International observed that no country had a worse record in human rights than Iran under the Shah.

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