by Karl Johanson
The following is a collection of anecdotal evidence and unreferenced vague facts. All conclusions drawn are based on biased, or circular, logic.
Remember back when the US bombed Khadafi? Remember why? Most people to whom I pose this question say, "Doesn't matter. I mean, the @#$%ing terrorist deserved it anyway." Near as I can remember, it was a car bomb in Germany which killed several hundred US troops that triggered the strike on Khadafi. The CIA determined that Syria was responsible for the bombing in Germany, so Reagan ordered the attack on Lebanon. (Syria, Lebanon? They're all the same over there, aren't they?) Why would the US attack Lebanon for something they believed another country had done? I'm perfectly willing to believe it was because Reagan is a @#$% idiot. However, maybe the following bit of paranoid exposition will explain the situation more clearly.
There are those who feel that a worldwide economic collapse would be a bad thing. Some of the people who believe this have a great deal of power; power which, to a certain extent, depends on keeping the current world economic system in its present state. In the years before the bombing of Khadafi the world price of oil was rather low. This would have made some of the above mentioned people nervous because there were a great many countries which relied on oil revenues to pay off world bank loans (or take care of the interest amount, anyway). What if, say, Brazil defaulted on its world bank loans because it didn't have the revenue to pay them? Lots of money lost to people who like money a lot. Then you might have some other oil-exporting country like Mexico say, "Hey, Brazil got away with it; why don't we try." From there we could have a cascade effect in which country after country defaulted on loans. Banks would go bankrupt, multi-national companies would become seriously unstable, some national currencies would become worthless, and who knows what would happen to the price of Brazil nuts.
How was this potential disaster staved off? It seems to me that a substantial increase in the world price of oil is what was needed. This would be difficult to arrange considering how many OPEC nations hated each other and thus wouldn't cooperate enough to avoid undercutting each other. What was needed was a common enemy for OPEC. And gosh darn it if a month before a major OPEC meeting the US didn't bomb an OPEC nation for something the US decided they hadn't done. Well, the OPEC members showed those Americans; they went and raised the world price of oil by close to $10.00 a barrel. I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies then charged $15.00 a barrel at the pumps and got away with it by blaming "The Arabs".
Originally published by Under the Ozone Hole Number Six – November, 1993
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