A Prelude to War

Great Britain closed the Iranian embassy in London after its own embassy in Tehran was attacked and personnel kidnapped.   Essentially, closing an embassy means the end of diplomatic relations.  Kind of like when a wife locks her husband out of the house.  Once you can no longer negotiate, a relationship, whether domestic or international, takes a nasty turn.  Wars begin this way.

Back in 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun, and its personnel held hostage for 444 days, until Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president.  If you’ve ever seen the film, Not Without My Daughter, you get an idea of the kind of problems that arise from the termination of diplomatic relations.  You also get an idea of just how bad Iran is.

Liberal critics accused Reagan of setting up Saddam Hussein in a puppet state, in a puppet war, without ever acknowledging that Iran had ambitions toward Iraq.  Like Germany in the two World Wars, Iran craves land, and oil.  Iran is looking to expand its territories and has the nuclear capability to accomplish this goal.  Wiping out Israel is like the icing on the cake.  Israel is the only thing standing between Iran and complete domination of the Middle East.

Turkey, as soon as it could, Islamacized itself.  With Iran ruling the southern Mediterranean and Turkey eventually ruling the North, they will have a monopoly on Middle Eastern oil.  Iran has  obvious ties to Russia and back in the day, Russia was hot for us to get our missiles out of Turkey, so much so that they precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

After the 1979 embassy kidnappings, the U.S. broke off all diplomatic ties with Iran.  Obama vowed that as president he would be willing to reestablish those ties, sit down with Ahmadinejad.  We’ve normalized relations with China and Vietnam.  Our relations with China are so “normalized” with China that we’re billions of dollars in debt to them.  If Obama had his way, we’d have normal relations with Cuba.  We have tried negotiating with North Korea.

Many more of our embassies and military bases have been bombed or driven out, as in Saudi Arabia.

Since 9/11, Americans have taken on more of an isolationist stance.  Let the Arabs keep their oil and see what happens.  What is happening is that China and India are all too happy to consume it.  Isolationism is not a particularly sound foreign economic policy.  When you no longer have trading partners to whom you can sell your excess products, or buy materials you don’t have (admittedly, there isn’t much America doesn’t have), you run into fiscal problems domestically.  Surpluses can drive down real production and cost a country jobs.  Shortages can drive up prices.

Free trade isn’t just for America within her borders.  Afghanistan is an interesting country we shouldn’t be in such a hurry to depart.  This mountainous country is filled with rare earth minerals necessary for the production of our prized electronics.  China, which already has cornered the rare-earth minerals market, has several stakes in the Afghan mountains.  If she controls Afghanistan, as she seems want to do, those rare-earth minerals are going to be even rarer.

China will control the market.  She can sit on those rare earth minerals forever, or she’ll expend all of Afghanistan’s mineral resources and save back her own.  That’s the trick to controlling any market, including the oil market.  So said an oil industry commodities trader.

“Why are we bowing to the Arabs?” asked I, back in the late 1980s, when Osama Bin Laden was blowing up all the natural gas pipelines.  “Why don’t we just drill for our own oil?”

“Because,” said he, “you want to be the last man standing when it comes to commodities.  You want to be the last country that still has oil.  If we use up all our oil and then we have to go begging the Arabs for their oil, they’ll really have us over the oil barrel.”

Alas, we elected someone as President of the United States who majored in bowing.  Although the closing of the Iranian embassy in London is a brief story, it has the unsettling feel of a store that has just closed its doors for ever.

Should events keep moving in this direction, our very nation could be hanging the “Gone Out of Business” sign.