Month: September 2006

Esquire:Feature Story:No. 042: The Country to Watch

Let me give you the four scariest words I can’t pronounce in Arabic: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak.

Osama picked the time (9/11), and Bush picked the venue (Iraq), but this fight between radical Islam and globalization’s integrating forces was preordained the day Deng Xiaoping set in motion China’s eco¬nomic rise almost three decades ago. You can’t rapidly add billions of new capitalists to the global economy and pretend the Islamic Middle East will remain queerly disconnected forever, somehow fire-walled from that borglike assimilation.

Africa is where Al Qaeda hides its money, guns, recruits, training camps—and its future. Africa will be the last great stand in this Long War, where all those impossibly straight borders once drawn by colonial masters will inevitably be made squiggly again by globalization’s cultural reformatting process.

Skeptic: eSkeptic: Monday, September 11th, 2006
Another reason for the appeal of 9/11 conspiracies is that they are easy to understand. As previously mentioned, most Americans did not know or care to know much about the Middle East until the events of 9/11 forced them to take notice. (The brilliant satirical newspaper The Onion poked fun at this fact with its article “Area Man Acts Like He’s Been Interested In Afghanistan All Along”).41 The great advantage of the 9/11 Truth Movement’s theories is that they don’t require you to know anything about the Middle East, or for that matter, to know anything significant about world history or politics. This points to another benefit of conspiracy theories — they are oddly comforting. Chaotic, threatening events are difficult to comprehend, and the steps we might take to protect ourselves are unclear. With conspiracy theory that focuses on a single human cause, the terrible randomness of life assumes an understandable order.

The great writer Thomas Pynchon memorably expressed this point in his novel Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting — religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”42

Charles Krauthammer – The Tehran Calculus – washingtonpost.com
Economic . An attack on Iran is likely to send oil prices overnight to $100 or even to $150 a barrel. That will cause a worldwide recession perhaps as deep as the one triggered by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Iran might suspend its own 2.5 million barrels a day of oil exports and might even be joined by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, asserting primacy as the world’s leading anti-imperialist. But even more effectively, Iran will shock the oil markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s exports flow every day.

Iran could do this by attacking ships in the Strait, scuttling its own ships, laying mines or just threatening to launch Silkworm anti-ship missiles at any passing tanker.

The U.S. Navy will be forced to break the blockade. We will succeed, but at considerable cost. And it will take time — during which the world economy will be in a deep spiral. Continue reading “The Tehran Calculus”