The dollar is in great jeopardy: every day, the US government further entrenches itself in debt to foreign countries, just to try to ‘save’ our currency and our economy. Furthermore, not only is the US going into vast amounts of debt to foreigners, we are even going to war over our deficit. What’s more, our initiatives in Iraq and central Asia have not only been caused by our failing economy, but by who will be in charge of the oil fields in Iraq and surrounding countries after said initiatives are settled. US initiatives in Iraq and central Asia are driven by the US’s ambition to keep the dollar as the sole trading medium for oil, and to keep the US as the most powerful of the worlds’ superpowers.

Our government is in a sticky situation. We are in a war that is becoming increasingly unpopular day-by-day, not only at home but also with many fellow UN and NATO nations. This war, said to have been started to combat terrorism in Iraq and the Middle East, was really started so the US could secure itself as the only nation in control of the Iraqi oil fields.

One could say that starting a war is a great way to jump-start an already sluggish economy; our new war also opens up new economic frontiers for US (and, obviously, British) oil companies and weapons manufacturers. President Bush told the nation at the onset of the war that Iraq was full of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as well as terrorists: this was simply a lie. In the early nineties, a high ranking Iraqi general defected from Saddam Hussein’s regime to the US: from this general our government learned that it was official Iraqi policy to dismantle all WMD in accordance with US demands. Moreover, Hussein was a dictator, who wanted complete control over his government and country. A terrorist like Osama bin Laden would not have been tolerated because terrorists are known to be free thinkers and rebels, they do not follow rules: bin Laden and al Qaeda would have been looked upon as being a threat to Hussein’s power.

An economy as large as the US’s requires huge amounts of oil to support it, so when it became known that Iraqi oil reserves were being targeted for acquisition by foreign (European) countries, our government decided something had to be done. It started in the mid-1990’s when Saddam Hussein began to do something that chilled the US government to the bone: trading oil for Euros. Since the Euro came on the market, it has become the biggest (possible) competitor to the US dollar. If one were to add up the economic resources available to all Euro-trading countries, the total would be an amount far greater than what the dollar has at its disposal. It actuality, the only barrier holding the Euro back from becoming more powerful than the dollar is the fact that OPEC only uses the dollar to trade oil in.

So when Hussein began trading oil in Euros, thus circumventing OPEC and the US, it worried many of the political and economic elite. The fact that Hussein was trading oil in Euros brought up this question among European countries: if Saddam Hussein, sitting on one of largest remaining oil reserves, could trade oil in Euros, why can’t we? Accordingly, the US had to take some sort of stand, or risk losing the currency that drives our economy, and thus the war began. The fact that we even went to war shows just how worried the US government was over the oil situation in Iraq; threats towards the US since the Cold War ended have largely been from small countries like North Korea and Iraq: such conflicts were easily manageable since said countries are not superpowers or allied with any other countries. The United States now faces a united Europe, in a commercial and financial battle over who will control the oil, and ultimately, what country will become the next superpower and control the world financial markets.

In simple terms, the US is trying to salvage what has become a sinking “economic” ship. The dollar is becoming worth less and less as the US economy continues to fall; unless the current economic disagreements between Europe, East Asia and the US are solved, the US may find its economy sunk and the dollar replaced by the Euro as the leading trading currency on the world and oil markets. US initiatives in Iraq and East Asia are mainly caused by the need to control the oil flow of that area, because oil is crucial to the US and its financial markets.

Extra Source:
Top Iraqi General Defects. No author given, taken from The London Times March 22 1996. Article at
http://www.payk.net/mailingLists/iran-news/html/1996/msg00361.html