Forget the Eurozone — this is surely the scariest news of the year.

From the Daily Mail:

• Fears mount that Iran could be ‘nuclear ready’ in a matter of months
• UN intelligence suggests Iran was helped by foreign experts – including rogue Russian scientist
• Russia foreign minister says any military action would be a ‘serious mistake’
• Condoleezza Rice: ‘We must do everything we can to bring Iran down’
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains defiant

Russia and China have expressed growing concern about a mooted American military strike against Iran over its alleged nuclear programme.The UN last week warned it had ‘compelling evidence’ to suggest Iran is secretly building an arsenal of nuclear warheads.

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is this week due to publish a damning report on the findings fuelling fears Iran could be ‘nuclear ready’ within months.

Sticking my neck out a little, if a rampant communist dictatorship like the Soviet Union can have nuclear weapons for over forty years without nuclear apocalypse (not to mention ethnocracies like Pakistan and Israel) then I can’t see what the problem is with Iran having them. Surely a last ditch strike on a pre-nuclear Iran would confirm the scary post-Qaddafi reality that dictatorships, autocracies and theocracies are not safe from Western liberal interventionism until they have gained a nuclear arsenal?

More concerningly, a Western attack on a nation at the heart of Eurasia — and a friend to the other Eurasian autocracies, particularly Russia and China — is surely a message that America and Israel will do everything in their power to maintain the petrodollar status quo, something that rising powers like Russia and China find distasteful and disrespectful.

But the emerging reality of a multi-polar world will do nothing to stop the hawks from clawing and shrieking against the reality of change.

From Haaretz:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she is sure the Israelis will defend themselves against the Iranians if they were to reach nuclear capabilities.

“I don’t have any doubt that the Israelis will defend themselves if the Iranians look as if they really are about to cross that nuclear threshold,” Rice told Newsmax in a TV interview.

I — on the other hand — have no doubt that the era of American-Israeli-British primacy is drawing to an end. The global system of floating fiat currencies is being gutted by years of competitive debasement. The international financial system is a house of cards, swaying in the breeze. Western industry has been gutted, and shipped to the East. Western capital is exported away to the East via humungous Western trade deficits. Western labour markets rot, beleaguered by high unemployment, evaporating skills, and huge inequality between the rich and poor. Western discontent is rising. Most dangerously, the West remains highly dependent on foreign oil — a supply that a new war, or some other black swan might disrupt — wreaking havoc.

So, as I wrote last month:

Sadly, we know how that aphorism from Winston Churchill goes: that Americans will do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.

Which is why I’m coming to believe that the military-Keynesian establishment might try and kill every bird with one stone — a new regional war in Eurasia, probably involving Syria, Iran and Israel. Let’s look at what that might accomplish:

1. Create a new post-9/11-style hard-to-question patriotism — “There’s a war on — we all need to rally together around the flag — the complainers and protestors must hate America”
2. Put America back to work — in weapons factories, and on the front lines.
3. Give the economy a large Keynesian injection — through war spending.
4. Take out Iran, a powerful enemy of America — and send a threatening message to other uppity Eurasian autocracies like Russia and China.
5. Curtail civil liberties & censor the internet — “There’s a war on — we all need to rally together around the flag — and those who don’t must be working to undermine America”