Chickens come home to roost (I)

Up till the beginning of the last century, the main fuel for the industrial production of goods everywhere was coal. By the middle of the nineteenth century however crude oil had been discovered and pumped out of the ground at Baku in present-day Azerbaijan and the state of Pennsylvania in the USA. The first problem with this strange product must have been what to do with it. This question was partially answered when kerosene distilled from it was used to provide light in homes and provide stupendous wealth for Rockefeller. By 1900 however, the British had come to realise that oil was by far a superior fuel for the ships of the Royal Navy than coal and the search for crude oil began to enjoy some priority since those ships of the line were responsible for stitching the vast British empire together.

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The search for oil was global but not blind, as clues were provided by the study of the history of the empires that had flourished in that region in past millennia. That was when cities like Bagdahd were said to have been lit up at night by huge oil lamps. This suggested that oil deposits were to be found in that and adjoining areas and the search for crude oil was therefore concentrated in such places. And it paid off quite handsomely. Oil was found in several places which we now recognise as the rich oil producing gulf countries such as Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and of course Iran. Apart from Iran and Saudi Arabia in this list, the other oil bearing states in that region were small, hardly worthy of being described as countries and this made the people extremely wealthy as the money accruing to each citizen from the sale of oil was huge. Those countries are among the richest in the world but they are also the most politically exposed countries around the globe. They produce vast quantities of a commodity that they do not consume and have to import everything they consume including their food and water. But they have vast quantities of oil which the countries of the West need so desperately that they are willing to go to war to secure their supplies, hence the extreme volatility of the politics of that region. Add the underhand insertion of the state of Israel into the Middle East to that mix and you have a powder keg primed to go off at any time, as it is happening in real time now.

At the risk of sounding repetitious, it has to be said that the presence of crude oil in that region has exposed the place to unrelenting greed which like blind ambition over-reaches itself and falls on every side. The fight over oil in the Middle East has come to be expected but what we have today has gone beyond oil and has been overtaken by the inordinate ambition of a few, principally two intellectually challenged men who are determined to make history for the wrong reason or for no reason at all. Little men to whom enormous power has been devolved. They are old men for whom the future is short but men who are determined to go out in a blaze of infamy which in their delusion they imagine is glory.

Iran is different from other countries in the Middle East. In the first place,  it is a real country, occupied by more than 90 million people with more than five millennia or more or less independent existence. As the Persian empire, at that time, an empire which sprawled through three continents, her inhabitants crossed swords with Alexander the Great and survived the scourge of the Mongols. They were subdued by the all conquering Islamic armies and were converted to that faith albeit as Shiites in contrast to the Sunni version practiced by their conquerors and neighbours from whom being also predominantly Persian, they remain distinct. In addition to these differences, Iran was never part of the Ottoman empire and when oil was discovered there by the British in 1908, the Shah of Iran was on hand to sign a trade agreement with them. That the agreement was lopsided is beside the point. According to that agreement, the Shah, at that time the ruler of Iran was paid the sum of two and a half million dollars up front and 16% royalties on all the oil pumped out of Iranian soil. This agreement was faithfully respected until 1951 when a socialist inclined Prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh was democratically elected by the Iranians to run their affairs. One of the first steps he took in office was not just to repudiate the one-sided 1908 agreement but went on further to nationalise the Iranian oil industry. This did not sit well with the British who contracted the then fledgling CIA to instigate a coup which not only deposed the democratically elected government but replaced Mossadegh with a monarch who ruled with a barely concealed iron fist at the behest of his western backers. The Iranians however fought back and under the flag of Islam deposed the Shah in 1979. Now in a fit of irrationality, Donald Trump, goaded on by his self created demons, has decided that a puppet must be put back in power in Teheran so that the Americans can control the flow of Iranian oil. At least that is his much trumpeted excuse for his reckless decision to launch bombs and other such missiles on Iran. Unfortunately, the Iranians are not reading from his script and are putting up quite a fight for their sovereignty against heavy odds incuding the virtual decapitation of her established leadership. Nobody, least of all Donald Trump, expects the Iranians to win this war just as only a few people were expecting them to resist for as long as they have. But then, their fight has been described as an existential one which they cannot take lightly. Many chickens have come to roost in Trump's backyard in the last three weeks or so. They have come to lay eggs, troublesome eggs which are likely to hatch into a very troublesome brood especially with the ghost of Epstein hovering over them.