ECONOMIC TERRORISM AGAINST IRAN VIA THINKPROGRESS

NOVANEWS

Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress and at Grist has posted a little technocratic note discussing how a carbon cap could cut down on Iran’s income from hydro-carbons, effectively a nifty sort of indirect sanction that would have the positive effect of weakening Iranian National Socialism. Put aside the wonk-ish thought-experiment—sanctions never seem to be effective, except at killing brown people—and look at the flow of Johnson’s argument:

A strong cap on carbon would significantly cut the flow of petrodollars to Iran’s hostile regime, a Wonk Room analysis shows. The economic and political strength of Iran’s dictatorship is a threat to the national security of the United States and the world, and its nuclear ambitions threaten to destabilize the Middle East.
Yesterday, diplomats from “six world powers have met for the first time to discuss imposing new sanctions on Iran for its failure to suspend work on its controversial nuclear program,” but negotiators have not yet figured how to achieve President Barack Obama’s goal of being “consistent and steady in applying international pressure.”
Here are the serial assumptions that I want Brad to prove instead of stipulate: (1) Iran is hostile; (2) Iran is a dictatorship; (3) “the economic and political strength of Iran’s dictatorship is a threat to the national security of the United States and the world”; (4) “its nuclear ambitions threaten to destabilize the Middle East.”
Lest Brad play ingénue and claim that only lunatics, anti-Semites, flat-earthers, Muslims (same as anti-Semites?) et al think that those four claims are anything other than gospel truth, here are my objections.

(1)   Hostility means acting against the interests of the American people. But the American people have nothing to fear from Iran, which will never attack America or American interests unprovoked. So why “hostile”? Because it’s against the sort of imperialism that has turned its neighbors into charnel houses? Who just shipped bunker-busters to Diego Garcia? Which country is ringed by US bases and threatened regularly by the IDF?
(2)   Dictatorships don’t hold elections, especially ones that they don’t falsify the results of.
(3)   Putting aside logic, i.e. that if there is no dictatorship, the sentence collapses, I want to see a causal explanation for how Iran’s “economic and political strength” threaten world security. Because it doesn’t.
(4)   If it wants nuclear weapons, for which there is no evidence, it wants them as a deterrent against a country in which fascist lunatics are enthroned as intellectuals. And even those mad-hatter intellectuals concede that a nuclear-armed Iran is not a threat to America or Israel.
Johnson also tacitly accepts the non-sense about Iran’s “controversial nuclear program,” but Iran has not violated the terms of the NPT. What the Obama administration wants is for it to prove that it has no intent to weaponize its uranium. This is a deliberately impossible threshold-of-proof, requiring renouncing the Iranian right to an independent nuclear-development capacity. Johnson goes on to write,

If the world moves away from oil dependence, Iran’s regime will no longer be able to rely on petrodollars to stay afloat. Other unfriendly regimes propped up by carbon-fuel money, such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, will also feel the pinch, improving our national security and making it less likely our armed services will fight battles amid the oil fields. For that to happen, the United States must pass comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation as fast as possible, the stronger the better.
“Regime” here is a code-word, meaning one of two things: a country with an independent foreign policy, or a country engaged in a national-developmental project. Such countries are “hostile” to an empire used to extracting tribute via a petro-dollar fiat currency system propped up by constant conflict and the use of the country’s productive economy to support a high-technology military-industrial sector.
What this has to do with “national security,” I have no idea. Johnson oddly doesn’t understand how the oil sector is necessary for imperial ambitions. Countries that use their oil monies for independent development don’t play along with this system, but a carbon-free economy makes the extraction of tribute through elevated oil-prices impossible.
The notion of securing our “national security” by transitioning to a carbon-neutral economy does make sense, but only when national security is used in its non-technical sense—when we use it to actually mean national security, and not “the Empire’s robust health.”

Why any of this entails sending in battalions of shock troops to destroy Iranian and Venezuelan society, rendered as fighting “battles amid the oil fields” (they are in river deltas and beneath Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela) does not escape me, though.
If you want to maintain an empire by force, you have to use force sometimes when the threat fails and collaborator-regimes like Punto Fijo in Venezuela collapse. But I’m with him: let’s get some comprehensive legislation in place. And let’s leave Iran and Venezuela alone, too, while we’re at it. Technorati Tags: carbon tax, Iran, petroleum, sanctions, Venezuela
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