High Costs of Israeli Threat against Iran
8 June 2008
english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8703190796

TEHRAN (FNA)- One remark by an Israeli cabinet minister hinting at a
possible US or Israeli attack on Iran has sent oil prices up by a record
$11/barrel to a record $139 per barrel Friday. That should tell us what
would happen if the Bush administration were crazy enough to attack Iran, or
to let the Zionist regime do it.

Most analysts say an actual attack on Iran would send oil almost immediately
to past $300 per barrel - a level that would strangle economies worldwide
and send the world into an economic collapse not since the Smoot-Hawley
Tariffs kicked off the Great Depression.

The repercussions of that would be staggering, a commentary by Dave Lindorff
in Oped News said.

America, which runs on oil, would grind to a halt. Gasoline and home heating
oil would double or triple in price, leading to desperation in the coming
winter for those living north of the Mason-Dixon line, and to a mass exodus
of the elderly from Florida and Arizona, where air-conditioning would no
longer be affordable.

In China, an economy almost wholly dependent upon the manufacture of goods
for sale to American consumers, hundreds of millions of workers would
suddenly find themselves unemployed. With their remittances to their peasant
relatives halted, half the country would be kicked back to the
pre-capitalist era, only without guaranteed wages, homes, food and
healthcare. It is likely that unrest unprecedented since the Cultural
Revolution would erupt.

The Middle East would, of course, explode.

In Iraq, fighters would rise up in solidarity with each other and begin
attacking American forces in the war-ravaged country in earnest, probably
making the Tet Offensive in 1968 Vietnam look like a picnic. Where the US
had half a million troops in Vietnam in that offensive, the military is
already stretched to the breaking point in Iraq, with supply lines barely
defended.

It makes you wonder what is going on in the higher reaches of the US
bureaucracy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has in the past intimated
that he is no fan of war with Iran, just sacked the two top men in the Air
force - the most gung-ho of the service branches in terms of Iran war
mongering. The unprecedented surprise firing of Air Force Secretary Michael
Wynne and the Air Force's top officer, Gen. T Michael "Buzz" Moseley, was
officially blamed on their poor handling of the nation's nuclear weapons
arsenal, in the wake of last year's unauthorized and improper removal from
storage and cross-country aerial transfer of six nuclear-armed cruise
missiles in launch position on a B-52 Stratofortress, and the discovery this
year of an earlier "inadvertent" shipment of ICBM missile warhead nuclear
triggers to Taiwan. While it is possible that those two incidents were the
cause of the firings, there remain serious unanswered questions about both
incidents, and particularly about the cruise missile flight.

As I (Lindorff) reported earlier on this site (oped news) and in
Counterpunch magazine and American Conservative magazine, there were a half
dozen unexplained deaths of US airmen, including two suicides, which
occurred just before and after that flight last August 30, none of which
were investigated at least publicly by the Pentagon or the FBI according to
local prosecutors and medical examiners contacted. A number of experts in
nuclear weapons handling have said that it would be "impossible" for the six
warheads to have been removed from guarded bunkers at Minot AFB in North
Dakota, mounted on cruise missiles, loaded onto launch pylons under the wing
of a B-52, and flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, all as a "mistake."

This leads inexorably to the question: What was being planned for those
warheads, if they were not being removed from storage by mistake, and if
they were being moved without the knowledge of the top brass, including
Gates, at the Pentagon? Recall that the only reason anyone learned about the
incident was that it was reported outside the military chain of command to a
reporter at Military Times newspaper by several Air Force whistle-blowers
upset by what they were seeing.

We already witnessed the sudden resignation from the post of CentCom Command
of Adm. William Fallon, whose outspoken opposition to the Bush/Cheney
administration's talk of attacking Iran led to his being pushed aside in
favor of the more pliant Gen. David Petraeus. Fallon was pushed out by Iran
war hawks because of his opposition to an attack. Were the Air Force
Secretary and Chief of Staff forced out by Gates because of their pro-attack
position?

Plenty to ponder here, but the concerns of oil speculators, who have driven
up the price of oil by 8.6 percent (and the stock market down by 3.2
percent) in a single day, in large part on war rumors, should have us all
concerned.

It's not just about the price of gasoline.