One might perceive it as an ill-minded joke if there were reports of demonstrations in favour of a climate catastrophe. Yet precisely this is happening just right now in the Persian Gulf with the military manoeuvres of Unitedstates and a large number of puppet states in their following allegedly aimed at preventing Islamic state expansion on the oil wells. As the desperate capitalists have dropped any pretext of intergenerational justice and chosen to flood the markets with oil as if there was no tomorrow, such a military provocation can only be captured appropriately with the above description. The fossil energy industry does not any more serve its own purpose, and currently only works if regimes fill in the cost of finding fresh reservoirs with subsidies. For that, they do in exchange spend the carbon of future generations to balance the numerical budgets in their banks. Out of this complicity comes the military demonstration for the continuing of that until it dries out. The analysis that the war against the Islamic state is a trade scam of the ammunition industry is hence to be supplemented with the observation that it is by now one of the fossil energy industry as well, and since both decided so many battles in the past it is to be noted that the most reasonable estimation is the two major ingredients of the military-industrial complex can only be defeated at once and not one after another. And of course, given the “new-born massacre” propaganda lies of 1990, the idea of a disruption of its breastfeeding from a raped planet strongly resonates with the rapist.

But before going in depth, the concept of the “puppet state” requires proper definition. Synonymous to the client state (as in computer systems) or the vassal state (as in history books), the puppet state is defined by the Wikileaks “cables.” These documents contain a number of character descriptions of politicians, and depending on their respective degree of affiliation with the imperialist these personalities are being controlled by the manipulation of the puppet characters depicting them. One could also point to the non-Wikileaks-approved Yatseniuk quotes, but in principle this is the case with all states pursuing diplomatic and military relations with Unitedstates. That means in principle the imperialist is able to attempt to turn anyone into a puppet, regardless of hierarchy, only depending on the degree of mental resistance of the target. This was eminently visible in the so-called democratic state in Iraq when leadership succession was dictated by the imperialist, only to be now further revised with a change of tactic again reducing reliance upon that manipulation. It is approaching banality to add that in the marine provocation, such as in terrestrial bonding efforts with puppet states, threatened species are being abused for target practice. Such compensatory measures for lack of superior firepower indicate that in a larger perspective the imperialist´s powers are waning, such as in the Nazi assault on Britain which never entered the island other than in the form of rockets. The grotesque military provocation is more of a gesture towards the current Arab monarchies than to the Islamic state. This is being affirmed by the unconcealed imitation, because only under this assumption it is reasonable to deduce that the fact thereof would not hamper its effect.

So when the North Americans with their puppets serve the oil capitalists an otherwise meaningless gesture of loyalty, what does it mean for the other two significant players in the gulf, the Islamic State and the Islamic Republic? First, the Saddam regime propaganda that Persia was nothing but a bloody American puppet state as under the Shah is being proven absurd. Although first of all being a Persian and only second to that a Muslim, Khomeini resp. Khamenei is absolutely not that, and the Washington regime can only wish he was, such as Stalin of Mao in contrast to the imperialist´s imagination. In fact the military manoeuvre is as much of a provocation against the Islamic Republic as against the Islamic State. Likewise, it is a dead end for Tehran to brand its fresh Western neighbour a terrorist enemy of the kind of the Saddam regime. Given the real risk of all-encompassing disruption of the gulf oil supply by a coastal reactor meltdown whose containment in that interior sea would concentrate the poisoning to a much smaller area, both sides should be interested to arrive at an antiimperialist consensus which cannot be disrupted as easily as the oil extraction.

Tehran should be strongly interested to find on the other bank a neighbour with whom it can negotiate that risk without the imperialist being called in. After so many fruitless sessions of “nuclear negotiations” with the Europeans who always threatened with American warfare, this problem is pressing for a local solution. Only then there can be realistic negotiations with Europeanunion states over real mutual concerns such as the human rights issue rather than about NPT interpretations (see July 26, 2013). On the other hand Mosul and Baghdad should be interested to reduce the risk of contamination without an increased risk of intervention. The political purpose of the “Persian atom” in West Asia cannot be substituted with eventual IS conquests of nuclear arsenals, because having put its focus on regeneration rather than stability a self-referential state is no suitable container for toxic assets of that type. The Islamic state could only use atomic bombs to draw a line underneath its existential failure, not for deterrence and blackmail as the capitalist state, but if it were to fail it could only do so in a stage of world revolution when the grave can still be closed by the most anti-imperialist of the stable states, so it is naturally equipped with a higher chance of survival without carrying the ability to close its own grave.

The supreme leader of Tehran on the other hand might not be interested to change the current risk balance until the collateral risk from the operation of puppet states in the neighbourhood is gone. But the halt of the commercial oil spill, presumably only possible by exhaustion or by anti-imperialist liberation of the Arab peninsula, increasingly is gaining weight as well, last but not least as it is a precondition for any Sunni/Shia exchange of territories free from imperialist occupation. The “Iraq-Iran” war legacy, the remainder of which lives on in the IS/IR enmities despite the former puppet is now definitely out of the hands of the imperialist, politically is a phoney divide compared with any real opponents of real puppet states of imperialism anywhere in the world and their fight against the betraying of country and people by Unitedstates collaborators. What Khamenei has missed though, and this is not to blame on Baghdadi, is to draw a deadline for the American collaborator regime to switch over, and probably that has contributed a lot to the confusion on the Arab side who is which. Unlike a territorial border between Shia and Sunni loyalties, which can be fuzzy as long as the foreign policy consensus remains the same, the line for the puppet state beyond which it loses the recognition of its Eastern neighbour must be drawn absolutely clear, even more so if it has already been crossed.

Although the rumour mill is running hot like a wind machine without a proper cooling system, thereby attracting the entire food chain of the political landscape as the mechanic friction is being scaled up just like the whole thing, thereby invisibly exceeding negligibility, the statements of the military-industrial complex do not signify a breakthrough for either side of the oil war. The helpless cackle of the trade speculators – death trade in this case – however strongly indicates that a lot is at stake, as the imperialist runs its war machine without a filling meter and itself does not know when it is going to run dry. Given the fragile nature of the Saudi-American relationship, it seems highly unlikely that either regime is capable to knowingly hide from itself and each other the precise amount of cheap time remaining and highly plausible that the current condition can only be brought about by a full blind situation in which the highest echelon of government does itself not know how close it is to the brink of fossil burnout. This is the only way for the two sides to collaborate without a transparent fault line at which the phoney alliance could be mathematically broken. Besides that, it is the second instance thereof after the passing of peak oil that was equally repressed in 2006.

The behaviour of the imperialist in Iraq resembles that of a person who has left from somewhere, but then halfway to elsewhere suddenly gets the idea to have forgotten something irreplaceable – the oil?!? – and hastily returns, only to never arrive anywhere, due to its self-induced panic. This is strange as already the 2003 Iraq war was said to complete the “unfinished business” of the 1991 one. Now the approximation of a third one by the current aggression can hardly be seen as a second one as this would ignore the first one. The spreading out of funding, or more precisely the replacement of the funnelling of resources through one big funnel to the “national government” (a word which wouldn´t have had an odd ring at that place yet a few months ago) with many small regional fill-in spots, which due to the capitalist state´s gross violation of the strictly non-commercial license of this writing now supplements its militarist “manufacturing of consent” by means of senseless parading of the seas for the oil scam, is a striking illustration: It is not merely an issue of territorial or international waters or of regional cooperation; but the benchmark for the probably due to its resource throughput most corruption-threatened waterway is whether the circle of neighbours can close in consensus not to call the imperialist in, and the benchmark for that is the “nuclear issue.” Of course that spending only brings about a financial blowback of IS revenues. Given that the liberation of Riyadh is more likely than a political realisation of the Unitednations ambition of a nuclear-free zone in West Asia, although one may precede the other, it seems unwise for the rulers in Riyadh whose survival depends on keeping the “oil secret” even from the NSA to call for such a parade unless the dry-up is near and a probably futile last ditch effort seems as mandated from their perspective as in the wind-down of WWII, so the occurrence thereof could be classified as an indication of dry-up. Other possible indicators signifying the close proximity of that point would be the sudden movement of notable chunks of the military budget, and given that most of it is not available on short notice one percent is already a remarkable amount, such as in population demographics.

Despite a reckless war of attrition, the imperialist has not made any substantial gains from the independence movement. The sclerotic Baghdad regime is being propped up with escalating micromanagement as to try to keep the looming fear of combat casualties at arms distance, but the term “exit strategy” has entirely deserted from the vocabulary of the political debate. The current “strategy” is not a strategy at all, but in fact a trade-off of incalculable time of involvement against limited width thereof. That tactic makes sense in a position of tactical weakness but strategic strength where it is reasonable to calculate that things may get better, but in the opposite situation of tactical strength and strategic weakness the law of entropy is more prevalent than the setting of evolution. The Islamic state on the other hand, despite absorbing all the heat of the imperialist onslaught, has not yet made the “great leap forward” from its current Syrian-Iraqi puberty to the maturity of a new sovereign of the Arab peninsula either, who among other things ends the barbaric “drone” terror in the deep South thereof. Part of that unsatisfying quagmire is the Persian choice.

What will IS be in a generation, a task of abolition successfully accomplished or an open wound contained by imperialist mercenaries and puppet states? The reasonable assumption is that the oil is unlikely to last that long (or the reservoirs cannot even pay for the cost of their risks as in the “Deepwater Horizon” scenario), but that is subject to the reservation that a generation ago it was reasonable to assume the same about thermonuclear annihilation, and yet the scenario was stretched into the looming reactor overkill of the current. Feeling lucky that climate change could be postponed yet another generation nevertheless is a behavioural pattern of decreasing value. When the Saudi monarch watches the amassed warships do their phoney drill, it is more likely than not that he does it with the feeling that it could be the last time. Otherwise it would be interested to keep this for later. For the Arab ruler, blocking the Islamic state from the gulf is like biting a poisoned apple it cannot swallow. Yet for the Persian ruler, blocking the imperialist from gulf is like drinking a glass of water. And of course the Islamic state now is old enough to make up its own minds as to what is a mere element of bluster, or vanity-coated chest-banging, and what not.

This sudden plagiarist and somehow animalistic turn of the oil war could not be predicted by the imperialist itself, which is in a post-surprise condition now, what contributes a lot to its strategic weakness. Just like a little while ago the Pentagon had to admit that it was not capable to keep track of its own internal abuse issue, the “new situation” of the Washington regime is that it now is in for external surprises. What in the double attack on the trade towers still was an exception finally is normalcy. The ongoing bleeding of the gulf – as the ruthless oil exploitation brings along Bahrain type brutality – can only be stopped in ripping apart the military-industrial complex, as this is the last thing it is clinging to. For this effort, IS has adopted the “bottomless pit” strategy, that is to tease the imperialist into squandering an ever increasing amount of its resources on its final opponent in order to shorten the death spasm of the collapsing system. This includes besides all the mercenaries the imperialist war machine itself, which shall be judged by the environmental cost of its empty provocations as well. Before the inflated currency finally sinks, it obviously makes an absurd stand. But due to bleeding out the country and the people, as it would have to be expected after a terror bombing campaign that couldn´t hit the heart of the resistance though, there remains no doubt over the final handling of the depraved monarchy, it is only a matter of how much information on its inner workings can be extracted from it before it is over and what might be suitable means to achieve that purpose as Bush-style Guantanamo torture is not.

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See also:

- The Canadian Conundrum – Causes and Consequences of a Containment Catastrophe (3.11.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/11/518616.html
- Has Australia Suffered a Covert Military Coup? (24.10.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/10/518520.html
- Demographic Endgame – IS/UK Relations in a Nutshell (15.10.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/10/518439.html
- Hongkong: Tehran in a Cool Pool (3.10.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/10/518334.html
- Marx, Lenin, Mao and the Futurology of Scientific Anarchism (26.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518310.html
- The Anarchist Guide to IS Psychology (19.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518183.html
- The Islamic State Messages in the Light of the Climate Catastrophe (11.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518121.html
- Atomic Testing in the Digital Age (13.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517630.html
- Must Christians in the Islamic State Suffer Another Bloodbath? (11.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517608.html
- Double Emergency Alert: Ebola Acceleration, Internet Smokescreen (8.8) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517551.html
- The Gaza Massacre – Implications and Consequences (5.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517537.html
- The Japanese Occupation Legacy – A Defining Ingredient of Totalitarian Democracy (28.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517363.html
- Gaza – Vivisection of a Death Cult (20.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517265.html
- Macropolitical Side-Effects of the Imperialist Occupation of the Philippines (4.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517113.html
- Birth of an Independent Hope – the Revolution in West Asia (26.6.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/06/517081.html
- Hindu Supremacism – A Spent Force of Casino Capitalism (30.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516814.html
- The German Sustainability Scam and its Fascist Purpose (21.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516731.html
- The Pacific Fata Morgana and its Imperialist Origins (12.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516662.html
- Boko Haram – An Image From The Future (4.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516551.html
- How Deep Is the Atlantic Divide Really? (8.4.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/04/516271.html
- Palestine, the United Nations and the Refugees (21.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516041.html
- Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html
- What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html
- The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html
- Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html
- NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html
- Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html
- The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html
- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html