Concern about strike on Iran bumps up oil price

Are the Israelis going to deal with one of President Bush's biggest problems by bombing Iran before the president leaves office? Administration officials keep pooh-poohing the swirling reports, but the reports are convincing enough to cause flutters in the oil market.

After ABC News on Monday quoted an unidentified Pentagon official citing an increasing chance that the Israelis would attack Iranian nuclear facilities, oil again ticked up today to around $140 a barrel.

The ABC report followed stories last month reporting that Israeli air forces were conducting exercises to rehearse for possible strikes and other articles quoting Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz saying that an attack was "unavoidable" if international diplomatic efforts didn't halt Iranian enrichment of uranium.

Exasperated U.S. officials didn't want to get into an on-the-record discussion of the likelihood of such an attack, but ridiculed the use of all these unidentified sources. Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said: "You know, I need to find this guy, because apparently he's an expert on the Israeli military, an expert on Iran and an expert on nuclear issues at the same time. Let's get him a Nobel Prize."

-- Paul Richter

Photo credit: Abedin Taherkenareh / EPA

Comments

[SoCalSailor]

So why then does Treasury Secretary Paulsen say there is nothing that can be done to alleviate oil prices? The Cheney Administration and its Pentagon could grab Israel by the throat and tell them to back off, thus alleviating oil prices. Oh, I forgot, the Cheney Administration doesn't care about the falling living standards of the citizens of the U.S., only their geopolitical fantasies. And fantasies they are, with no hope of realization.

[Jeugenen]

ISRAEL GETS BAD

MAD, the international principle of Mutual Assured Destruction protects nuclear armed nations from catastrophic destruction by nuclear warfare, because a nuclear armed adversary that makes a pre-emptive nuclear attack is assured of a devastating nuclear counter-attack. Thereby, the nuclear armed nations competing for scarce World resources are compelled to resolve their fights by diplomacy or conventional warfare, to their own benefit and the benefit of the World.

To be protected by MAD, it is imperative that the competing nuclear armed nations maintain favorable balances of nuclear weapons. The adversaries must have just enough nuclear weapons to make a nuclear war suicidal, in reality and in the wildest fantasy.

MAD creates an obsession in nations vulnerable to their nuclear armed enemies, to acquire nuclear arms for national survival, as in the case of Iran being notoriously threatened by Israel. The Israeli Judeofascist land robbers, working with their Crypto-Neo-Marxist Diaspora in the Republican and Democrat parties has acquired an arsenal of 150 or so nuclear weapons, for defense against her justifiably outraged non-nuclear Middle Eastern neighbors; instead of the nuclear armed Russian and Chinese Marxists.

Recently, in defiance of the international law against deploying nuclear weapons in warfare, Israel has been implicitly threatening to launch a nuclear strike against Iran, if she does not stop enriching uranium. If the great nuclear powers of the World tolerate such an unprecedented nuclear attack on a non-nuclear power, MAD will have failed to protect the World environment against nuclear warfare.

To insure that renegade nuclear armed nations are deterred by MAD; an amendment to international law against the deployment of nuclear weapons in warfare shall be needed. BAD, an international law of Bilateral Mutual Destruction, that imposes on every nuclear armed nation in World the civic duty to launch a surprise nuclear counter-attack on behalf of a non-nuclear power that is insanely attacked by a renegade nuclear power, would extend the deterrent power of MAD to such renegade nations.

Furthermore, BAD would reduce the future incentive for nations to develop defensive nuclear arms, by putting their survival at greater risk of bilateral retaliation, as in the case of Iran. In the case of Judeofascist Israel, the possession of an arsenal of nuclear weapons of any size has made her a certain candidate for one bang annihilation.