Iran cold-war forefront over US Dollar Reserve Currency issue

I was planning to blog couple of different posts by next week, but one headline from today forced me to pre-empt.

Iran presses ahead with (US) Dollar attack

Here are notable excerpts from this article:

Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in currencies other than [American] Dollar from March 20.

Iran has the third-largest oil reserves in the world and pricing oil in currencies other than dollars is a provocative move aimed at Washington. If Iran switches to the non-dollar terms for its oil payments, there could be a new oil price that would be denominated in euro, yen or even the yuan or rupee.

India is already in talks with Iran over how it can pay for its oil in rupees.

Even more surprisingly, reports have suggested that India is even considering paying for its oil in gold bullion. However, it is more likely that the country will pay in rupees, a currency that is not freely convertible.

Last week, Indian state-owned group Hindustan Petroleum said that Indian businesses could not pay for Iranian crude imports in rupees unless the federal finance ministry exempted such payments from crippling withholding tax. This issue remains unresolved.

India and Iran have agreed – but not yet started – to settle 45pc of payments for Iranian oil in rupees. Iran will then use the currency to buy imports from India.

New Delhi currently spends about $12bn (£7.6bn) on Iranian oil each year, importing 12pc of the country’s needs from the country.

India pays for its oil in dollars, routed through a bank in Turkey after a previous mechanism was shut down in 2010. The Indian government has been resisting calls to stop importing oil from the pariah state. “There have been problems with regard to Iran’s nuclear programme,” Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, said on Friday. “We sincerely believe that this issue can be and should be resolved by giving maximum scope to diplomacy."

As I've maintained during previous blog-posts, this continued cold-war stance is of no benefit whatsoever to the majority of population on this planet. It is definitely of no benefit to people of Iran, nor is it of any benefit to American population. These events are happening at precisely the worst possible time, considering multiple economic uncertainties all over the world. Increase in oil prices will have unimaginable and catastrophic economic consequences to too many people in the world, large majority of them poorest of the poor who don't have a dog in this cold-war fight.

As mentioned before, the concerns aren't specifically about how despotic/undemocratic the Ayatollah regime is or how human rights of Iranian population are suppressed, or any of those issues. The cold-war has been around since 1950s  (soon after end of WWII).

The key point in above article is: "Iran has third-largest oil reserves in the world". The real issue is about control of global resources by a centralized banking hegemony, nothing else. Such control would put global population at the mercy of whims of very select few. There should be no illusion whatsoever that American population will benefit in any way by militaristic stance on this issue. Almost all Western press has been unanimously complicit and biased, providing no historical perspective about complexity of the situation.

I feel it is urgent that a bilateral solution is found to defuse this crisis, or else there are dark storm clouds ahead to face for too many people.