Reply #5: And thus, Iran can hold the entire Western World over a barrel. Literally! [View All]

Wow, Pallas. This never even occured to me, but what a damning revelation! This is HUGE!

Any attempted US attack/invasion of Iran now or in the forseeable future would set in motion a global catastrophe of epic proportions. If the Iranians responded to a US invasion attack by cutting off their own exports, and additionally by targeting and destroying Saudi and Kuwaiti oil exports, they would effectively be cutting off the energy lifeline to the entire Western World.

And without Oil as the energy of default necessity, the entire Western World -- particularly those nations most dependent on Oil for transportation and food production -- would experience massive convulsions and collapse of infrastructure. Governments would be overthrown and nations would collapse into total anarchy while their leaders find themselves dragged into the streets and destroyed by extremely violent mobs.

One step before this, and even more devestating would be the immediate and ferocious retalliation by the Western World against the United States for invading Iran. Most of these nations already strongly oppose an invasion of Iran, and are instead -- as Russia, China and the EU have been doing -- seeking to establish "friendly" trade agreements and other non-threatening arrangements with the Iranians. They would take a United States unilateral invasion of Iran and the threat of oil export cutoff as a very grave threat to their own national security, and would immediately retaliate aganst Washington by economic (i.e. Dumping the Dollar) and even military/nuclear means. Under this scenario, the end result could only be a no-win Armageddon -- the destruction of humanity.

Bottom Line: With Iran in the quintessential position to either allow or deny the Western World its' petroleum lifeline, the Iranians may very well have checkmated a rogue US Executive in the game of Geopolitics. This new, stark reality is both fatal flaw and deathblow to the Bush religion of NeoConservatism as a methodology for US global domination by resource hoarding. Quite literally, the Iranians have the US over a barrel.

I think we need to play nice with these people.