Q1. Can you tell us something about factors not often mentioned in the mainstream media regarding Iraq, oil & currency?
JD: Could you say something about some of the factors that the mainstream media doesn’t often mention in regard to the proposed attack on Iraq? Especially some rather curious religious factors in the present Washington administration, and also about the currency and oil.
HH: I think the great untold story of the US, what you might call the US ‘preemption’ plan to attack Iraq, is really that it’s not only about oil but about the, and this is sort of rather strange, but there’s a lot of evidence that the Christian right has this Armageddon scenario. And I haven’t really read the Book of Revelations, but apparently there are people in the Christian right who believe that there must be this big battle fought in the Middle East and I think that’s an unspoken motivation.
But all of the motivations for this pre-emptive strike on Iraq, the ones that the administration talks about, you know, it’s helping the world get rid of weapons of mass destruction one minute and then the next minute it’s about bringing democracy to Iraq and helping democratize the Middle East. And of course the only ones they really won’t own up to is the motivation around oil and Iraq’s petroleum and this scheme for having the Iraqi’s pay for this war with their own petroleum.
And the other unspoken motivations I think, or unacknowledged motivations, are really the desire to break the OPEC cartel and whatever you think of OPEC, in current prices they’re still getting less for their oil than they did in 1973 when they quadrupled the price. So the whole thing looks to me like a war about not only petroleum but also the recycling of petrodollars. And when OPEC denominated its oil in dollars many years ago it was probably a very sound idea, but now it’s very counter-productive from many points of view. For example, the OPEC countries who have many friends in the developing world have to say to their friends in the developing world, “Well, you have to first earn over-valued US dollars before we can sell you the oil.” And this is a terrible burden to poor countries whose commodities are very under-valued and the terms of trade for their commodities are not very favorable. And so they have very little that they can export to earn those dollars to buy the petroleum.
So one of the moves that some OPEC countries have been making, particularly Venezuela, is to make barter deals, bartering their oil directly for commodities which these countries can’t otherwise sell. And the Venezuelans have made about thirteen of these bilateral barter deals with developing countries. And this of course has angered the Bush administration, particularly the deal they made with Cuba, which was that the Venezuelans sent Cubans oil, as it’s very close to them as you know, in exchange for Cuban doctors and paramedics paid by the Cubans who are on loan to Venezuela to set up public health clinics in rural villages in Venezuela. And so the whole politics of oil is also wrapped up in the politics of the dollar and whether the dollar can really continue to be the world’s global reserve currency. And I have thought for many years that that was too much of a burden on the dollar, there’s just far too many dollars out there in the world and that this dollar global currency regime is bound to come to an end sooner or later.
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