Canada should rethink its global alliances

In America’s heedless rush into war with Iran, few things could plausibly deter this impending catastrophe besides America’s closest friends siding with her most vehement enemies

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

It is by now certain that the two towers of the World Trade Center, in addition to the 47-story tall WTC 7 building, were brought down on September 11, 2001 by controlled demolition. A website created by Scholars for 9/11 Truth sets out in painstaking detail gleaned from mountains of evidence and analysis conducted over the last four-and-a-half years exactly how the demolition was conducted.

Members of the team signing on to this conclusion include Robert M Bowman, former director of the US Space Defense Program; Eric Douglas, formerly the Chair of the Independent Peer Review Committee for the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s World Trade Center Official Inquiry; James H Fetzer, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy at University of Minnesota; Steven Jones, Professor of Physics at Brigham Young University; John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy at University of Guelph; Diana Ralph, Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa; Morgan Reynolds, Economics Professor at Texas A & M and former chief economist for the US Department of Labor; and many others from the fields of physics, engineering, history, and political studies.

What are the implications for the incoming Minister of Foreign Affairs? The lucky MP is yet to be named at press time, but it is widely reputed to be foreign affairs critic for the Conservatives when in opposition, the former party leader Stockwell Day.

With other evidence pointing to a diversion of intercepting aircraft, a cover-up and removal of crucial crime scene evidence, and several inadvertent admissions of official foreknowledge of both the attacks by planes and the demolition of the buildings, we can surmise that the events of that day were staged by people close to the George Bush administration. The decisive role that event has gone on to play in manufacturing Congressional and public support for bold and controversial policy decisions by that administration, including severe restrictions on travel, highly penetrative powers of surveillance, and pre-emptive unilateral war-making on at least two foreign countries, points to motive.

While the new Conservative regime in Ottawa may look less harshly upon US foreign policy of late than the outgoing Liberal regime of Paul Martin did, it would do well to study and understand the motives and the tactics driving that US foreign policy today.

The key objective of the Bush administration is for the US government to gain control over those elements in the global oil industry that determine world oil prices. While there are many producers and exporters of oil around the world both inside and outside the OPEC price-fixing cartel, very few nations have enough excess oil production capacity to allow them to marginally flood or marginally starve the world oil markets, in effect making prices collapse down or leap up, or to stabilize prices when events like violence in Nigeria or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico threaten to spike prices upward.

Alberta may have a lot of oil in reserves in its oil sands, but the scope of capital investment required to bring that oil to market, and the cost of financing that capital, dictates that every drop that producers are able to bring to market be brought to market as quickly as possible. While Alberta may be a large contributor to the global oil markets, control over the oil sands gives no one any ability to raise, lower, or stabilize global oil prices.

Often forgotten in oil history lore is the reason why OPEC was formed and why, in 1973, the large, mostly Arab, oil producers and exporters cut off shipments to the United States, driving world prices up four-fold. It was directly due to US material support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kipper War with Egypt. While taking control of oil prices is certainly motivation enough for a country of America’s economic and political reach, the crippling political blow the nation suffered from spiking oil prices in the hands of enemies is what launched the modern neo-conservative drive to take over the US government.

Combined with military humiliation in Vietnam and widespread domestic turmoil in its biggest cities, as well as the paralyzing Watergate scandal in the White House and the ensuing constitutional crisis over the fate of the disgraced President, powerful elites in US business and political circles saw the life of their American Republic pass before their eyes. Oil has been the key to every major international confrontation in the last 100 years, and in any imagined future confrontation, American policy thinkers see oil, and especially control over its price, as all the more critical.

Unable to make the case to the American people that a series of costly and bloody Middle East wars would be necessary on the grounds that America must gain access to spare oil production capacity to be able to control global prices of oil, the Bush administration instead fabricated a supposedly Muslim-inspired terrorist threat to Americans, and set up and staged the events of 9/11 to make the argument real.

Besides revealing the key players in the Bush administration as cold-blooded mass murderers and war criminals guilty of serious crimes against humanity, the information also indicates to Canadian foreign policy planners what their American counterparts are thinking and how they generally plan to achieve their objectives. For example, any back-channel diplomatic warnings about what Canada views as a reckless rush to war with Iran would be met with complete dismissal by American policy-makers who have already been undeterred by accurate warnings concerning the ability of a US occupation to pacify a post-Baathist Iraq.

Obviously, a US war with Iran would be monumentally catastrophic for the region and the world, including Canada, especially with the threat of nuclear arms in the conflict, and the presence of China as a serious player in the dispute. And so it would serve Canada’s interests to try avoiding such a war. Despite recent speeches by the Iranian president, there is no real threat that Iran poses to its neighbours, let alone America, while Iran is justifiably anxious about marching American armies to its east in Afghanistan, its west in Iraq, its north in the Caucasus, and its south in Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.

As in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is the war-making belligerent in this case, and any avoidance of such a catastrophic war will necessarily require a change in American calculations. America’s thirst for oil and her business and political elite’s entrenched desire to control oil prices cannot be changed. Only America’s perception of the costs to be endured in any contemplated war on Iran can be changed. And the only costs America is capable of considering, in its post-diplomatic era, are its own blood and its own treasury.

Presumably America has arrived at calculations of what an Iranian war would cost it in blood and treasure based on the way the world is aligned at present, and evidently it’s a price the business and political elite believe is affordable, given America’s uninterrupted rush to war with Iran. Therefore, countries like Canada are required to alter the alignment of the world in order to cause America to re-jig its calculations and choose a non-war path in dealings with Iran.

Canada’s refusal, along with leading European nations, to join America in its war-making advance into Iraq did nothing to alter America’s perception of its chances there. Therefore, a simple refusal to join in any war on Iran would not be sufficient. What may be required is for America to perceive the possibility of other opposing armies entering the picture with the blessings of Canada and European nations, or at least their refusal to block or condemn the entrance of these other armies.

If the new Conservative regime in Ottawa correctly perceives that an American war on Iran would be catastrophic for Canadian interests—in terms of severe economic and energy disruptions, the possibilities for much wider war, and the threat of nuclear exchange—policy-makers now need to assure their American counterparts that we would invite and welcome the participation, on the Iranian side, of China and Russia, should the US attack. Given what those policy-makers have already proven capable of—the events of 9/11, the unprovoked wars on Iraq and Afghanistan—this would appear to be the only form of language American policy-makers can hear and react to. Radical as it sounds, an alliance between America’s erstwhile friends, including Canada, and her chief global enemies may be the only thing standing between a peaceful resolution in Iran and an all-out nuclear exchange for the world.

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