Iran: History Never Sleeps

A little update to earlier re the Iran tanker issue. I've just watched George Galloway state that essentially the sanctions are only against jet fuel and not crude oil, so therefore the Iranian tanker was detained unlawfully. Or as an act of piracy as he states. In counterpoint I've also just watched Rudy Guiliani advocate for possible action against Iran, calling them a murderous regime. Imploring the UK to join America and also stating that it was unlikely France and Germany would help as they "do business with Iran".

I'm certainly against the idea of war, but apart from that I really don't know what to think. Perhaps they're all just bad hombres.

What's interesting though is that Guiliani popped up in my little googled investigations last night.

After the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979 most major oil companies left Iran and the country (I'm basically copying and pasting Wikipedia here) struggled to sell their oil internationally. However, an Israeli-Swiss businessman called Marc Rich entered Iran with his company Glencore, which was based in Switzerland. He then ignored US and international sanctions on Iran and became the major trader of Iranian oil over the next 15 years. Supposedly the oil bought from Iran was secretly piped and sold to Israel.

The United States found him guilty of sixty-five related offences and he was on the FBI most wanted list until Bill Clinton controversially pardoned him on his last day in office.

See his Wikipedia page for more details; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich

The original indictment against Rich in 1983 was "filed by then-U.S. Federal Prosecutor (and future mayor of New York City) Rudolph Giuliani".

I've always been very suspicious of the overthrow of the Shah. Mainly because the Ayatollah arrived back in Iran (having been in exile in France) on a plane full of journalists. Which just seems very odd and stretches credulity a bit in regard the idea that it was a purely internal revolution.

(Is this what the Glorious Revolution

was like?)

It also leads one to wonder who really runs Iran. Are they all just mad Mullahs? Or are they rather more business-minded? They certainly seem to have strong ties to China. Who in turn seem to be very cosy to the "Party of Davos" types in the west, as Steve Bannon describes them. Again, it's hard to say who the good guys and who the bad guys are, if indeed there are any good guys at this high level of international politics. Perhaps it's just one big game where both sides are effectively controlled by the same hand. Or maybe it's more akin to gangster rivalries between the various powerful interest groups. Who knows? ..perhaps I can find out at some point.

You kind of get the feeling that we're currently in some vast cold war that the average sheeple are just completely unaware of. Brexit feels simple in comparison. Though no doubt that's all a part of it.