Flashback: Petrodollar Warfare – Saddam abandons Dollar for Euro
Foreign Exchange: Saddam Turns His Back on Greenbacks
By William Dowell for TIME. Monday, Nov. 13, 2000.
Europe’s dream of promoting the euro as a competitor to the U.S. dollar may get a boost from SADDAM HUSSEIN. Iraq says that from now on, it wants payments for its oil in euros, despite the fact that the battered European currency unit, which used to be worth quite a bit more than $1, has dropped to about 82[cents]. Iraq says it will no longer accept dollars for oil because it does not want to deal “in the currency of the enemy.”
The switch to euros would cost the U.N. a small fortune in accounting-paperwork changes. It would also reduce the interest earnings and reparations payments that Iraq is making for damage it caused during the Gulf War, a shortfall the Iraqis would have to make up.
The move hurts Iraq, the U.N. and the countries receiving reparations. So why is Saddam doing it? Diplomatic sources say switching to the euro will favor European suppliers over U.S. ones in competing for Iraqi contracts, and the p.r. boost that Baghdad would probably get in Europe would be another plus.
At the end of World War II, an agreement was reached at the Bretton Woods Conference which pegged the value of gold at US$35 per ounce and that became the international standard against which currency was measured. But in 1971, US President Richard Nixon took the US$ off the gold standard and ever since the US$ has been the most important global monetary instrument, and only the United States can produce them.
The fear of the consequences of a weaker US$, particularly higher oil prices is seen as underlying and explaining many aspects of the US foreign policy, including the Iraq and Libyan War. The reality is that the value of the US$ is determined by the fact that oil is sold in US$. If the denomination changes to another currency, such as the euro, many countries would sell US$and cause the banks to shift their reserves, as they would no longer need US$ to buy oil. This would thus weaken the US$ relative to the euro. A leading motive of the US in the Iraq war — perhaps the fundamental underlying motive, even more than the control of the oil itself — is an attempt to preserve the US$ as the leading oil trading currency. Since it is the USA that prints the US$, they control the flow of oil. Period. When oil is denominated in US$ through US state action and the US$ is the only fiat currency for trading in oil, an argument can be made that the USA essentially owns the world’s oil for free.
So long as almost three quarter of world trade is done in US$, the US$ is the currency which central banks accumulate as reserves. But central banks, whether China or Japan or Brazil or Russia, do not simply stack US$ in their vaults. Currencies have one advantage over gold. A central bank can use it to buy the state bonds of the issuer, the USA. Most countries around the world are forced to control trade deficits or face currency collapse. Not the USA. This is because of the US$ reserve currency role. And the underpinning of the reserve role is the petrodollar. Every nation needs to get US$ to import oil, some more than others. This means their trade targets US$ countries.
Because oil is an essential commodity for every nation, the Petrodollar system, which exists to the present, demands the buildup of huge trade surpluses in order to accumulate US$ surpluses. This is the case for every country but one — the USA which controls the US$ and prints it at will or fiat. Because today the majority of all international trade is done in US$, countries must go abroad to get the means of payment they cannot themselves issue. The entire global trade structure today works around this dynamic, from Russia to China, from Brazil to South Korea and Japan. Everyone aims to maximize US$ surpluses from their export trade.
Until November 2000, no OPEC country dared violate the dollar price rule. So long as the US$ was the strongest currency, there was little reason to as well. But November was when French and other Euroland members finally convinced Saddam Hussein to defy the USA by selling Iraq’s oil-for-food not in US$, ‘the enemy currency’ as Iraq named it, but only in euros. The euros were on deposit in a special UN account of the leading French bank, BNP Paribas. Radio Liberty of the US State Department ran a short wire on the news and the story was quickly hushed.
This little-noted Iraq move to defy the US$ in favor of the euro, in itself, was insignificant. Yet, if it were to spread, especially at a point the US$ was already weakening, it could create a panic selloff of US$ by foreign central banks and OPEC oil producers. In the months before the latest Iraq war, hints in this direction were heard from Russia, Iran, Indonesia and even Venezuela. An Iranian OPEC official, Javad Yarjani, delivered a detailed analysis of how OPEC at some future point might sell its oil to the EU for euros not US$. He spoke in April, 2002 in Oviedo Spain at the invitation of the EU. All indications are that the Iraq war was seized on as the easiest way to deliver a deadly pre-emptive warning to OPEC and others, not to flirt with abandoning the Petro-dollar system in favor of one based on the euro.
Informed banking circles in the City of London and elsewhere in Europe privately confirm the significance of that little-noted Iraq move from petro-dollar to petro-euro. ‘The Iraq move was a declaration of war against the US$’, one senior London banker told me recently. ‘As soon as it was clear that Britain and the US had taken Iraq, a great sigh of relief was heard in London City banks. They said privately, “now we don’t have to worry about that damn euro threat”.
First Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for US$, shortly before each country was attacked.The cost of war is not nearly as big as it is made out to be. The cost of not going to war would be horrendous for the US unless there were another way of protecting the US$’s world trade dominance.
Guess how USA pays for the wars? By printing US$ it is going to war to protect.
After considerable delay, Iran opened an oil bourse which does not accept US$. Many people fear that the move will give added reason for the USA to overthrow the Iranian regime as a means to close the bourse and revert Iran’s oil transaction currency to US$. In 2006 Venezuela indicated support of Iran’s decision to offer global oil trade in euro.
6 months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, Iraq had made the move to accept Euros instead of US$ for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the US$ as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.
Muammar Qaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the US$ and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Muammar Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Muammar Qaddafi continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.
Muammar Gaddafi’s recent proposal to introduce a gold dinar for Africa revives the notion of an Islamic gold dinar floated in 2003 by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, as well as by some Islamist movements. The notion, which contravenes IMF rules and is designed to bypass them, has had trouble getting started. But today Iran, China, Russia, and India are stocking more and more gold rather than US$.
If Muammar Qaddafi were to succeed in creating an African Union backed by Libya’s currency and gold reserves, France, still the predominant economic power in most of its former Central African colonies, would be the chief loser. The plans to spark the Benghazi rebellion were initiated by French intelligence services in November 2010.
– Nalliah Thayabharan
Abraham Lincoln worked valiantly to prevent the Rothschild’s attempts to involve themselves in financing the Civil War. Interestingly, it was the Czar of Russia who provided the needed assistance against the British and French, who were among the driving forces behind the secession of the South and her subsequent financing. Russia intervened by providing naval forces for the Union blockade of the South in European waters, and by letting both countries know that if they attempted to join the Confederacy with military forces, they would also have to go to war with Russia.
The Rothschild interests did succeed, through their agent Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, to force a bill (the National Banking Act) through Congress creating a federally chartered central bank that had the power to issue U.S. Bank Notes. Afterward, Lincoln warned the American people:
“The money power preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. ”
Lincoln continued to fight against the central bank, and some now believe that it was his anticipated success in influencing Congress to limit the life of the Bank of the United States to just the war years that was the motivating factor behind his assassination.
Modern researchers have uncovered evidence of a massive conspiracy that links the following parties to the Bank of Rothschild. Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, John Wilkes Booth, his eight co-conspirators, and over seventy government officials and businessmen involved in the conspiracy. When Booth’s diary was recovered by Stanton’s troops, it was delivered to Stanton. When it was later produced during the investigation, eighteen pages had been ripped out. These pages, containing the aforementioned names,were later found in the attic of one of Stanton’s descendants.
From Booth’s trunk, a coded message was found that linked him directly to Judah P. Benjamin, the Civil War campaign manager in the South for the House of Rothschild. When the war ended, the key to the code was found in Benjamin’s possession. The assassin, portrayed as a crazed lone gunman with a few radical friends, escaped by way of the only bridge in Washington not guarded by Stanton’s troops.
“Booth” was located hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia, three days after escaping from Washington. He was shot by a soldier named Boston Corbett, who fired without orders. Whether or not the man killed was Booth is still a matter of contention, but the fact remains that whoever it was, he had no chance to identify himself. It was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who made the final identification. Some now believe that a dupe was used and that the real John Wilkes Booth escaped with Stanton’s assistance.
Mary Todd Lincoln, upon hearing of her husband’s death, began screaming, “Oh, that dreadful house!” Earlier historians felt that this spontaneous utterance referred to the White House. Some now believe it may have been directed to Thomas W. House, a gun runner, financier, and agent of the Rothschild’s during the Civil War, who was linked to the anti-Lincoln, pro-banker interests.
Another myth that all Americans live with is the charade known as the “Federal Reserve.” It comes as a shock to many to discover that it is not an agency of the United States Government.
The name “Federal Reserve Bank” was designed to deceive, and it still does. It is not federal, nor is it owned by the government. It is privately owned. It pays its own postage like any other corporation. Its employees are not in civil service. Its physical property is held under private deeds, and is subject to local taxation. Government property, as you know, is not.
It is an engine that has created private wealth that is unimaginable, even to the most financially sophisticated. It has enabled an imperial elite to manipulate our economy for its own agenda and enlisted the government itself as its enforcer. It controls the times, dictates business, affects homes and practically everything.
It takes powerful force to maintain an empire, and this one is no different. The concerns of the leadership of the “Federal Reserve” and its secretive international benefactors appear to go well beyond currency and interest rates.
Andrew Jackson was the first President from west of the Appalachians. He was unique for the times in being elected by the voters, without the direct support of a recognized political organization. He vetoed the renewal of the charter for the Bank of the United States on July 10, 1832.
In 1835, President Andrew Jackson declared his disdain for the international bankers:
“You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.”
There followed an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on President Jackson’s life. Jackson had told his vice president, Martin Van Buren, “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me….”
Was this the beginning of a pattern of intrigue that would plague the White House itself over the coming decades? Was his (and Lincoln’s) death related by an invisible thread to the international bankers?
President James Abram Garfield, our 20th President, had previously been Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations and was an expert on fiscal matters. President Garfield openly declared that whoever controls the supply of currency would control the business and activities of all the people. After only four months in office, President Garfield was shot at a railroad station on July 2, 1881.
President John F. Kennedy planned to exterminate the Federal Reserve System. In 1963 he signed Executive Orders EO-11 and EO-110, returning to the government the responsibility to print money, taking that privilege away from the Federal Reserve System.
Shortly thereafter, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The professional, triangulated fire that executed the President of the United States is not the most shocking issue. The high- level coordination that organized the widespread coverup is manifest evidence of the incredible power of a “hidden government” behind the scenes.
In the 70′s and 80′s, U.S. congressman Lawrence McDonald from Georgia, spearheaded efforts to expose the hidden holdings and intentions of the international money interests. His efforts ended on August 31, 1983, when he was killed when Korean Airlines 007 was “accidentally” shot down in Soviet airspace. A strange coincidence, it would seem. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Senator Steven Symms of Idaho, and Representative Carroll J. Hubbard, Jr. of Kentucky were aboard sister flight KAL 015, which flew 15 minutes behind KAL 007; they were headed, along with McDonald on KAL 007, to Seoul, South Korea, in order to attend the ceremonies for the thirtieth anniversary of the U.S.-South Korea Mutual Defense Treaty. The Soviets contended former U.S. president Richard Nixon was to have been seated next to Larry McDonald on KAL 007 but that the CIA warned him not to go, according to the New York Post and TASS.
Senator Henry John Heinz III and former Senator John Goodwin Tower had served on powerful Senate banking and finance committees and were outspoken critics of the Federal Reserve and the Eastern Establishment.
On April 4, 1991, 52-year-old Henry John Heinz III, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, crashed in a Piper PA60 Aerostar when it collided with a Bell 412 helicopter near Philadelphia. Burning wreckage fell on the grounds of an elementary school in nearby Lower Merion Township; two of the dead were children playing outside at noon recess.
On the next day, April 5, 1991, former was also killed when twin-engine turbo-prop Atlantic Southeast Airlines plane flying from Atlanta went down in a thickly wooded area within view of motorists on Interstate 95. The coincidences seem to mount.
A commuter plane – Flight Atlantic Southeast 2311- twin-engine turbo-prop Atlantic Southeast Airlines plane flying from Atlanta carrying 23 people, including former 65-year old Republican Senator John Tower of Texas, crashed and burned in a thickly wooded area within view of motorists on Interstate 95 – a mile and a half short of the airport killing everyone on board.
Attempts to just audit the Federal Reserve continue to meet with failure. It is virtually impossible to muster support for any issue that has the benefit of a media blackout. The bizarre but tragic reality that the American people suffer from a managed and controlled media is a subject for another discussion.
For many years, numerous authors have attempted to sound the alarm that there exists a hidden “shadow government” that actually rules America. Most of us have dismissed these “conspiracy theory” views as extremist and unrealistic. The ignorance in America is overwhelming. Indeed, the contrast in general awareness of world affairs between the average American and the average European is striking. The concentration of power in America is frightening.
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