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It's all very familiar to me...Poor people...
What bothers me now is that I have plane tickets to travel to Serbia via Dubai in May and it smells like war in that area...shit...
If I manage to come (and to come alive) to Serbia looks like there will be election this European spring there and there will be protests who ever win simply because of terrific economic situation in Serbia. So it's going to be fucking grate holiday for me :(


Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein
by vbo on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 06:20:37 AM EST
We live in interesting times. That's a great holiday, though maybe not in the conventional sense of the term...

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 07:03:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I don't think there will be war: the real danger for that passed years ago.

I think that it suits a lot of people to make nationalist  bellicose noise, and others jump on the bandwagon to keep the oil price hyped.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 07:10:41 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The drums are being beaten loudly: U.S. District Court Rules Iran Behind 9/11 Attacks
In Havlish,   et   al.   v.   bin   La den,   et   al. , Judge Daniels held that the Islamic Republic of Iran, its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Iran's agencies and instrumentalities, including, among others, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps ("IRGC"), the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security ("MOIS"), and Iran's terrorist proxy Hezbollah, all materially aided and supported al Qaeda before and after 9/11.  

...

The evidence was developed over a seven-year international investigation by the Havlish attorneys who pursued the 9/11 Commission's recommendation regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers, following the Commission's own eleventh-hour discovery of significant National Security Agency ("NSA") intercepts: "We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government."  9/11 Commission Report, p. 241.

...

Attorneys emphasized that it is important to understand that Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s.  The attorneys cited their national security and intelligence experts, including Dr. Patrick Clawson, Dr. Bruce Tefft, Clare Lopez, Kenneth Timmerman, Dr. Ronen Bergman, Edgar Adamson, and 9/11 Commission staff members Dietrich Snell, Dr. Daniel Byman, and Janice Kephart, as well as the published writings of Robert Baer, to explain how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi'a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the "Great Satan") and Israel (the "Lesser Satan").  Iran and Hezbollah then provided training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.  The Iran-Hezbollah-al Qaeda alliance led to terror strikes against the U.S. at Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia (1996), the simultaneous U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and the USS   Cole (2000).  Shortly after the Cole attack, Iran was facilitating the international travel of the 9/11 hijackers.



tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 08:24:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Shit on Iran week.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 09:33:52 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I do hope you are right, this could turn very ugly.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
by A swedish kind of death on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 10:47:42 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The escalation is stepped up so much that it could become a war by inadvertance
by Katrin on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 12:26:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Though I feel I still have to gather some more data on the issue, I second the ideas of other here. Unilateral military action by Iran against oil tankers in the strait of Hormuz seems unlikely at this stage. Strategically this would put Iran against all the Arab nations in the region that export oil. A really desperate situation must come for something like this to make sense.

Most likely Iran will continue trading with China and India and keep access to basic goods. But the trade surplus can close rapidly if these countries cannot absorb the remaining production that today goes to Korea, Japan and other OECD countries. There are several potential impacts from this, certainly hitting the common man in the street.

luis_de_sousa@mastodon.social

by Luis de Sousa (luis[dot]de[dot]sousa[at]protonmail[dot]ch) on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 04:00:40 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Oil is reasonably fungible. India and China can re-sell the Iranian oil if the price gap between what India pays and the Brent exchange gets too high.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 07:21:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I think war is very unlikely.  This actually looks more like a dispute between Israel and the US than it does between Iran and the US.  In order to put the provincials -- Israel -- in their place, Panetta had to tell the Israelis that the big boys would take care of their bully problem if it ever came to that, telling Israel to go back to the playroom.  Israel was slapped down, but that necessarily invokes a symbolic response from Iran for being portrayed once again as the bully.  But neither side, nor factions within the governments of either side, has anything to gain from a war with Iran at this time.
by santiago on Fri Dec 30th, 2011 at 06:11:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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