Oil, Iran, and the Nuclear Future
January 21, 2006 |
The world is facing a huge problem in the coming months. Iran wants to pursue a nuclear program claiming it is to power their country. Considering how oil rich Iran is, the world stage sees through that claim and knows they want to pursue the technology for weaponry purposes. Ok, so what’s new? North Korea seems to pull this stunt every six months. Granted, Iran and North Korea are very similar. They both want to be players in the world market, show that they can do things true superpowers can, but they also want to hold the cards. You could call Iran and North Korea attention whores–but in a horribly terrifying way.The problem with the recent surge of nuclear demands on Iran’s part is that it has been simultaneous with anti-Israeli rhetoric. The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has said that he is skeptical that the holocaust happened, and that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and moved to someplace where people are more sympathetic to the Jewish cause, ie Europe or Canada. So needless to say an antisemitic Iran equipped with a nuclear bomb in firing range of Israel would be a huge problem–especially because Israel, also nuclear capable is of the sort to bomb first and ask questions later.
The chances of nuclear war escalating out of this situation are slim, but the there is another consequence to the current Iran situation–oil. Apparently 50% of the worlds oil passes through Iranian controlled ports, which means, if they wanted to, they could throw a huge wrench into the world oil market. Even though the USA doesn’t receive a single drop of Iranian oil, thanks to various trade embargoes, our price of oil will skyrocket if Iran were to slow down supply. Remember Hurricane Katrina, and the mass panic and fear that oil was going to be interrupted sending gas prices as high as $5 and $6 a gallon in some places? Yeah, we’d be looking at that again, or even worse. So you may be thinking that China and Russia wouldn’t stand for a huge cut in oil production and would step into intervene–or maybe Saudi Arabia would so as not to loose money on oil sales. Fact of the matter is no one seems to know what would happen. Russia buys oil from Iran under the table so maybe nothing would change. Fact of the matter is there are three things that need to happen in the next few months.
First, America has to address our dependency on foreign oil. This means calling the five big oil executives back to congress to testify, this time under oath. They are making money hand over foot thanks to high gas prices and congress should force them to start cutting into their prices to alleviate the price at the pump, and force them to start reinvesting some profits into alternative fuel production–we’ve got enough corn fields to produce ethanol until the cows come home, or what about hydrogen? If we force big oil to pay for the research we’ll have these technologies perfected and running safely in a few years.
Next, we need to open up oil drilling in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Yeah, it’s a wildlife refuge in Alaska that is the ancestral home of two Indian populations. One of the two wants to allow drilling. So that makes one Indian tribe and a boat load of Democrats who constantly kill this bill in the Senate. ANWR drilling would produce one million barrels of oil a day. Granted, it isn’t much but that is one million fewer barrels we have to rely on from the seemingly endless supply of hostel oil rich countries.
The final thing we need to do is enact a regime change in Iran. Though, this time it can’t be done militarily. Iran is simply too large of a country to pull off a successful ground campaign. It would require taking all of the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and calling up a boat load of others to pull it off successfully. This is not an option. We know it, Iran knows it, it just wont work. Even if it could, President Bush would never get congress to approve it. So you turn to the UN to place sanctions on Iran. Ok, even if Iran hadn’t recently moved all it’s money to untouchable Swiss accounts, we all know that UN sanctions are next to useless. Alright, so then how do we put pressure on Iran and remove Ahmadinejad from power? The answer lies in the successful fall of Communism fifteen years ago.
Communism fell throughout the world in just a few months because of educated students living in the Communist countries who wanted freedom from oppression. Supposedly there is a huge percentage of the Iranian population that desire the same freedoms though have yet to come forward and act upon it. In fact, we as a country have been waiting for the Iranian situation to solve itself in this way since the Clinton administration. Well, it is now more apparent then ever that the time for a social uprising and potential coup is now. With the inspiration from a few special forces units and CIA agents, the right people in Iran can be convinced that it’s time to act. The way to a safer Iran is through it’s own people. We learned this with the fall of Communism and frankly we are relearning it in Iraq. We just need to light a fire under the Iranian people and get them started.