Oil Reaching Record High Over Concern Over War with Iran

[Herb Schaffler]

Oil Rises to Record on Concern Iran Supplies May Be Disrupted

By Robert Tuttle
June 30 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose to a record above $143 a barrel, completing the biggest quarterly increase in nine years, on concern Israel may attack Iran over its nuclear program and disrupt supply from OPEC's second-largest producer.
Pressure on Iran to end uranium enrichment and the falling value of the U.S. dollar may drive prices to $170 a barrel, OPEC President Chakib Khelil said June 28. Kuwait, the fourth-largest OPEC producer, is taking precautionary steps to export oil if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, Kuna news agency reported.
``We are going beyond rhetoric at this point,'' said [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , managing director of JKV Global in Chicago. ``Israel's intentions are pretty clear. That's going to keep prices pretty high.''
Crude oil for August delivery rose $1.96, or 1.4 percent, to $142.17 a barrel at 10:01 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange after rising to a record $143.67. The price has doubled in the past year. Oil has risen 34.6 percent so far this quarter, the largest gain since the first quarter of 1999.
Foreign ministers from the Group of Eight nations last week suggested more talks to coax Iran into opening its nuclear program to inspectors, after speculation the Islamic Republic faces an imminent Israeli strike.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Wall Street's most profitable bank, said in a report that supply and demand, rather than speculators, are responsible for oil's rally.
`Excessive Speculation'
The U.S. House of Representatives last week approved a bill calling on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use its emergency powers to ``curb immediately the role of excessive speculation'' in any market it oversees where energy futures or swaps are traded.
Brent crude oil for August settlement rose $2.21, or 1.6 percent, to $142.52 a barrel on London's ICE Futures Europe exchange, after reaching a record $143.91.
Nigeria's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. among producers in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has slipped behind that of Angola amid violence by militants. Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc. and Eni SpA have all shuttered fields in Nigeria this month.
``Tensions ratchet up in Iran and troubles continue in Nigeria, drawing funds into the market,'' said [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , a broker at Sucden (U.K.) Ltd. in London. ``The weak dollar is also helping. The market does not want to break down just yet.''
The European Central Bank is expected to raise interest rates a quarter-percentage point to 4.25 percent, according to a survey of economists by Bloomberg News. The dollar has declined 8 percent this year against the euro.
Avoid the dollar ``at all costs,'' investor [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. said in Shanghai today. ``The best investments in 2008 are commodities and natural resources. Agricultural prices have much higher to go over the next decade. We have a shortage of everything including seeds.''
Rising Prices
Hedge fund managers and other large speculators almost doubled their bets on rising prices in the week ended June 24, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading commission data.
[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in New York oil contracts, the difference between contracts to buy and sell the commodity, rose to 24,217 contracts. Long positions climbed from a five-month low a week earlier while contracts to sell oil fell a second week to a two- month low.
To contact the reporter on this story: [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in New York at [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.
Last Updated: June 30, 2008 10:16 EDT

[Herb Schaffler]

[FONT='AF PEPSI','Arial Black']Getting Serious with the Oil Speculators[/font]

By Thomas McAdams DefordSince I wrote my column last week  a paean to the advantages of Pres. Bush continuing his slow disappearing act to keep him from further damaging our country’s national security and economy — two writers, both of whom have an unparalleled depth of experience and range of contacts, have given additional ammunition to the concern that the “attack-Iran” option is as frighteningly alive as ever.

Tom Powers, writing in the July 17 edition of the New York Review of Books, explores in detail the fact that the constant, ongoing saber-rattling from the Bush/Cheney camp has so embedded itself in the American consciousness that even Democratic nominee Obama, in the context of Iran’s ambiguous nuclear program, accepts US military action as a possible option.

Secretary of Defense Gates, the sanest of any senior administration official, who is clearly trying to head off the Cheney war party, has observed publicly that “another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.” But he too persists in saying that “the military option must be kept on the table.”

Powers attacks this piece of fraudulent conventional wisdom head on: “Forgive me, but why? The military option is a threat; if the threat is carried out it promises widening war and the possibility of failure on the scale of disaster. Why does a policy of courting disaster have to remain on the table?”

A nuclear-armed Iran would be an “existential threat” to Israel, we are told, a supposition that rests solely on the belief that Iran would actually use the nuclear weapons it may be developing to attack Israel, thereby guaranteeing its own destruction.

But exactly why a country with a 2,500-year history and a culture as rich as China’s would opt for self-immolation is never explained; we are left to take it on faith. Ahmadinejad may talk a nasty game, but he’s not the ultimate power in Iran. And, in any case, have we forgotten that Khrushchev threatened to bury us? But, post-Cuban missile crisis and reeling from that close encounter with Mutual Assured Destruction, the first use of nuclear weapons was indeed off the table, on both sides, despite such subsequent dangerous flashpoints as the 1967 war in the Middle East, the follow-up one six years later, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Vietnam.

Why do we believe it would be otherwise with Iran and Israel? For the past 30 years, as it has tightened its occupation and expanded its settlement of Palestinian lands, Israel has had a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. No doubt it is distressed at the thought that at some point in the future it may have to forego that monopoly. But is that reason enough for the US to willingly acquiesce in an explosion that could turn the Middle East into Armageddon? If, as they make a great pretense about, our Congress is unhappy with oil pushing above $140 a barrel, and the implications it has for the US and the international economy, they might well be weighing the pros and cons of a pre-emptive attack against Iran a little bit more carefully.

If Ahmadinejad sounds threatening, it’s worth recalling that it’s his country, after all, that was on the receiving end of an aggression from Saddam Hussein that killed over a million Iranians and that was tacitly supported by the US. And even before we invaded Iraq — and certainly thereafter — Bush’s designation of Iran as co-evil with North Korea and Saddam would have encouraged any Iranian leader to take notice.

If there were an “existential threat” on the loose, it was surely the one that South Korea was facing as its wild-eyed neighbor to the north actually produced a few nuclear bombs. Seoul, with its population pushing 15 million and less than an hour’s drive from the North Korean border and but a few minutes by bomb-bearing missile, could be obliterated in a blink. And in terms of rational behavior, anyone who would bet on Kim Jong Il over Ahmadinejad doesn’t know their “axis of evil” roster well. Yet, the administration is willing to talk with Kim, albeit a few years and a few bombs too late. Maybe we’ve accepted that North Korea sees nuclear weapons as a deterrent? Or is it that the South Korean right wing doesn’t have the lobbying power the Israelis do?

Sy Hersh’s piece in this week’s New Yorker describes a “major escalation of covert operations” by the US inside Iran, which his Washington sources explain are “designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” Another Washington insider told Hersh the increased activity was aimed at “undermining the government through regime change.”

Is the administration hoping that our covert military actions inside Iran will lead to an Iranian reaction that Bush could then cite, à la 9/11 and Iraq, to attack Iran? Hersh’s article quotes a participant in a meeting earlier this year in which Cheney said openly he was looking for a way “to create a casus belli.”

Haven’t we been down this road before, when the Gulf of Tonkin resolution gave LBJ what he needed to jump-start the Vietnam War? It was only later it turned out that the casus belli, which ultimately led to the death of 55,000 Americans, had been a result of US provocation.

Meanwhile, on the home front, after 30 years of inaction on Capitol Hill — our cars average the same gas mileage as they did in the late ’70s — Congress expresses surprise and outrage over the price of oil.

It’s all the fault of the “speculators,” our elected officials shout. The fact that speculators are the ones who take the risk and provide the liquidity and are in many ways the lifeblood of the capitalist system, which these same elected officials insist the rest of the world must emulate, seems to have escaped their notice.

One thing Congress might do, if it’s so concerned about the high price of oil, is to ask that Bush and Cheney and McCain, and Obama as well, publicly take military action against Iran off the table: you’d see a few of those speculators taking their winnings and heading for the doors. They’re not causing the high prices; they’re only reacting in a rational way to the irrational policies of our government.

[Herb Schaffler]

New War Brewing: US, Israel Take Dangerous Steps
by [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.
by Eric Margolis

GENEVA – The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program.
Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran’s nuclear program.
Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush’s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles – precisely the distance to Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran’s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel’s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran.
This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end.
Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets.
Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel’s media, President Bush even told Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America’s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence.
AIR BLITZ
Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles.
In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war.
Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S.
The Bush administration’s last desperate act, its Götterdämmerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran.
Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets.
GRAVE DAMAGE
The embattled Bush administration’s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel’s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation’s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel’s nuclear forces threaten its existence.
The dogs of war are being unleashed.

July 7, 2008

Eric Margolis [[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . See [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. .
Copyright © 2008 Eric Margolis

[Herb Schaffler]

Monday, July 7, 2008
Americans Had It Coming
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Everyone is complaining and crying about the high gasoline prices and, well, the rising prices of most everything else, especially food.
The problem is that hardly anyone wants to admit that it’s all part of the cost of empire and imperial adventurism. Do Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind?
In 2001 and 2002, weren’t many Americans (libertarians being the notable exception) exuberantly supporting the imperial adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan that has caused federal spending to soar through the roof? Well, what did Americans think — that empires come cheap?
Do you recall what conservatives used to say when the Soviet Empire came crashing down? They bragged that Ronald Reagan had caused the Soviet Empire to spend the nation into bankruptcy. Of course, there’s nothing new about that, as people who lived under the Roman Empire and British Empire learned.
But notice now that conservatives no longer brag about how they brought down the Soviet Empire. Why not? Because someone (such as a libertarian) might ask the obvious question: If out-of-control federal spending was bad for the Soviet Union, why isn’t it equally bad for the United States?
Of course, one big problem is that Americans convinced themselves that Iraq and Afghanistan were going to be free. U.S. officials could take control of Iraqi oil and finance not only the Iraq invasion and occupation but also the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. A self-funding imperial operation! Or they convinced themselves that the “coalition of the willing” would bear the costs of America’s imperialism.
Alas, it was not to be. Year after year, Iraq and Afghanistan have become a veritable black hole of federal expenditures, much of which cannot even be accounted for by U.S. officials.
Americans can’t say that they weren’t warned. From the inception, libertarians kept warning that the out-of-control costs of empire and intervention (on top of welfare and regulation at home) would inevitably be reflected in a crashing dollar and rising commodity prices.
Today, unfortunately all too many Americans are doing their best to avoid accepting responsibility for rising prices. That’s why they’re coming up with all sorts of interesting rationales for rising prices and the crashing dollar: foreign demand, speculators, oil companies, OPEC, capitalism, and tax cuts. Before long, they’ll undoubtedly add illegal aliens to the list.