AM saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” wrote Alan Greenspan in his memoirs, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World".
It took Greenspan four years and a million lives to admit that. But then “the Maestro” is known to take his time acknowledging the obvious.
Almost five years ago I started saying that America’s economy is bankrupt, that the world is paying the price in treasure, that we Arabs will pay a heavy price in blood. No one believed and some even laughed at the “notion” that America, whose “greenback” is the world’s currency, could possibly be bankrupt.
Well, here is news for those still clinging to greenbacks. Unless you continue financing America’s bankrupt economy as you have been doing for decades, your greenies will become worthless. In banking it is called putting good money after bad. In my banking days we used to stupidly do that sometimes. Not because we believed in the viability of the business we financed, but because we knew that if we stop financing, the business will collapse and we will loose all our money. So what to do? Keep pumping money on the flimsy hope that one day things will turn around for the business and we will recover all our money. That’s what the world is doing for America.
Problem is, like in most instances of putting good money after bad, they both end up being lost because rarely do things turn around when the business’ managers, like in the case of America’s political managers, are both, irresponsible and dishonest.
Check the dollar’s historical value in gold terms and you will observe its continuous deterioration. Remember, always, it’s the currency’s purchasing power that represents its true value. The best way to measure that is how much gold [world’s real currency], your money can buy. Each dollar you own represents a loan you have given America. If you acquired 1,000 dollars, that’s a 1,000 dollars you have loaned America, hoping you will be paid back its value when you use it to buy something else you want to own. Indeed, America is paying you back, but with dollars whose purchasing power declines every single day. If you own and therefore loaned America 300 dollars which once could buy you an ounce of gold, America pays back your 300 dollars, but that barely buy half an ounce of gold. And guess who manipulates both, the dollar’s value and the gold value. See how it works? In this way America is continuously borrowing from you dollars of a value higher than the dollars it’s paying you back.
In fact, oil prices haven’t really risen. Consider the gold price when oil sold at $30 and what it is now with the oil price breaking $80. Sure, oil has more than doubled, but then so has the price of gold. So where is the real increase? We Arabs are still taking home approximately the same amount of gold we took home a few years ago for our oil.
Now “the Maestro” comes out to say, it was all for oil. Of course it was. We said that all along Mr Greenspan. This mammoth but bankrupted economy is rail-rolling the world towards the cliff and we don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Damned if we stop it and damned if we don’t. If we all stop financing America by selling all our dollars today, America will collapse economically and we will loose the money we already lent it, and if we continue to finance it, America will continue its reckless spending and eventually collapse anyway, with our children losing their inheritance! What do we do?
First, America runs an international debt estimated at more than $10 trillion [yes trillion] hoping it will eventually remedy its malaise, then it goes on a military rampage hoping it will quench its oil thirst. It ended up accomplishing neither.
Yet, every American president claims that America is the greatest nation on earth. It is high time this “greatest” nation started paying for its lunches instead of bullying its way into the coffers of “lesser” nations.
The tragedy is not just the treasure this is costing us Arabs, but the blood too. Soon more countries in the region will be attacked, the hunt for control of oil continues.
We were told it all started with 19 misled young men on 9/11. That was followed by the war on terror, the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the attack on Lebanon.
Well, we have come a long way since 9/11. Makes you wonder, sometimes, why and how it all happened.
May God save the next targets: Syria and Iran. The “war on terror” or oil hasn’t reached climax yet.
Meanwhile, we are still clinging to our green has-beens. Mine still says, In God We Trust.
Munir Daair is a widely published political writer. He can be contacted at mdaair@gmail.com