Eppie, you’re wrong: it’s all about Israel. Sure, Israel has 200 plus nuclear warheads. True it can fry Iran. But if Iran somehow gets a few, not nuclear weapons, but missiles with nuclear warheads Israel will be fried as well. Gaza was already under Israel occupation a few years ago. They left, but they sporadically re-enter Gaza to massacre it children.

If it has nothing to do with Israel, why is Likud’s Nethayau, and traitors at AIPAC calling for war on Iran?

I don’t know Fallon and I might not like one thing about him if I did know him, but the overall curve of what has happened, so far as it can be discerned through what is reported publically, seems obvious to me: Fallon has resisted the warmongering obsession of this administration with Iraq and Iran to the extent consistent with his position and has reached the point where he would feel compelled to go beyond that level of resistance and therefore has resigned, with a big push from the White House to encourage him. That, in conjunction with Cheney’s mideast trip makes an attack on Iran a virtual certainty, I think, and soon.

It’s just not credible to me that Cheney’s trip is motivated by the concerns you suggest. Those concerns, as important as they are, don’t rise to his level. They would properly be handled through the State Department.

I think that the real reason for attacking Iran has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It’s the same as the real (in my opinion) reason for attacking Iraq: it’s crucial to keep oil traded in dollars. Without that, the dollar goes into free fall. As it has so often been, in human history, it’s about money, and money is about power, and power is about control over resources and the movement of resources.

As for Israel, I doubt if they really care about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons. They’ve got enough nukes to fry Iran. I think what they want is to seize Gaza, and they would do this during a war with Iran, and the world would barely notice.

The US wants to keep the dollar up and Israel wants Gaza. I think it’s pretty much as simple as that. Fallon’s departure makes me sick to my stomach.

In Dec. 2004 DeutcheBank reported that we were then in “Contango” in the oil market. Contango is when the futures prices exceed the spot price. This means that the market is over-inflated. If you will reflect a bit, shortly after this DeutcheBank report the Iran rhetoric started heating up. I am not one to subscribe to single issue conspiracy theories but rather believe that these issues may add nuts to the sundae. At the time oil was selling on the futures market at $65 per barrel though on the spot market it was selling for $10 less. DeutcheBank reported that if oil didn’t spike up to $77 many hedge funds would loose their assets.

Well, oil spiked a bit with the Iran rhetoric but failed to hit the mark. Shortly thereafter we saw the Lebanese conflagration which spiked the price to $75. Still not enough.

During all this time we saw Iraq’s oil essentially completely off-line, Nigerian gulf problems were/are/will be there, even after Katrina we never saw a real scarcity of supply. For the last 17 weeks we’ve put a million+ barrels of both crude and refined gas into storage. Even with these historic levels of gas in storage Sam Bodman lied to the American people. And now Cheney is going to the Saudis asking them to pump more gas, there is no shortage just poor reporting, hedgefund traders running up the price. These hedgefund traders are annonomous.

A good reporter would look into this, are the Russians running the price up? The big producers, are they buying are rebuying their own product raising the price with each transaction? I find it completely insulting that we get a Congressional hearing on whether Serius and XM satallite radio merging represents a monopoly while we have some serious manipulation of the oil markets yet we can’t get anti-trust hearings, can’t get much clarity on the vertical integration of Exxon-Mobil et al.