Just another idiot’s ramblings

OK. Time for what may turn out to be nothing more than a conspiracy theory, but is very ominous looking at the present.

Depending on which reports you read, anywhere from four to five undersea communications cables have been "compromised". I refrain from saying "cut" because very few of the accounts line up with each other. Reports range from cut lines to breakage due to seismic activity to power problems.

No matter what, all of the affected cables are in the Middle East, affecting the UAE.

This is where the conspiracy theory angle comes into play. If you look at the map put together by ILoveBonnie.net, you’ll see that it’s very unlikely that a ship’s anchor or even seismic activity could account for all of the cables.

Let’s don our tinfoil hats and see if we can come up with a reason why anybody would want to disrupt communications in the UAE. Aha – here it is. Iran plans on making their oil bourse operational in the first weeks of February.

A bourse is defined as a "European stock exchange", and an oil bourse obviously is an exchange devoted to oil trading. What’s important about Iran’s bourse is that, unlike all of the other oil markets in the world, it will not be tied to the US dollar.

There is a fascinating article at Energy Bulletin by Krassimir Petrov outlining the effects that Iran’s oil bourse would have on the American "Empire". It’s a wonderful read, and explains very clearly why having an international oil exchange that is not tied to the US dollar will affect the influence that the American economy has on the rest of the world. Changes to this influence will result in the US dollar being devalued significantly, leading to either deflation or hyperinflation in the American economy. Either of these actions will have significant negative impact, possibly causing another depression.

I hope you’ve taken the time to read Petrov’s article. I also hope that while you were reading it, you noticed it publication date: January 17 2006. That’s right – nearly two years ago the bourse was being seen as a threat. Do you remember hearing about it then? I don’t, either. What happened was that the bourse was delayed and is now on track to open in February of 2008. As of December 2007, Iran has already stopped accepting US dollars for oil.

Now, it shouldn’t take too much to put two and two together. The operation of the Iran oil bourse has the potential to collapse the American economy, and communications systems in the same geographic area have begun to fail, possibly due to sabotage.

It is also worth mentioning that these cable failures have not taken Iran offline, as some people have noted. Indeed, according to the Internet Traffic Report, it appears that Iran is totally offline, but remember that this information is based on the availability of a single router. (At the time this post was written, the single router listed for Florida in the US had 100% packet loss, but that doesn’t mean that Florida was offline.)

Still, broken cables offer a wonderful opportunity for communications listening devices to be added with very low risk of discovery. It may be that there is a plan to disrupt communications so the bourse will not be able to operate normally. It may also be that the cables end up having absolutely nothing to do with the bourse. I’m more of the paranoid type, and with our current president, I’m leaning towards there being a definite connection.

Regardless of any connection between the cables the bourse, if the US does end up going to war with Iran at some point, I think it will behoove us to question if the action is simply to help the US dollar retain its international value. After all, according to Petrov, a man named Saddam Hussein was the first to demand euros for oil (in 2000) – and look where he and Iraq ended up.