THE RICE PADDY

It was nice today to see someone standing up to America's roving bully-girl and headmistress. Little Condy got a little more than she was expecting when she went over to Russia to round up those ex-reds to her cause of punishing Iran for having the temerity to want to be energy independent. She was not expecting to be disagreed with. She isn't very good at that. Nobody in the US administration is. It really isn't difficult to see where recent Nobel laureate Harold Pinter is coming from in his comparison of the Bush government with Hitler's Nazi Reich.

On Friday, the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, accused Iran of spending 18 years of trying to develop nuclear weapons. He told the BBC that Iran wanted nuclear arms to intimidate the rest of the Middle East and possibly supply them to terrorists. Not like Israel then! Now folks, isn't this all beginning to sound like the sort of nonsense that the Bush administration cooked up as an excuse to invade Iraq?

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only. But then again Iraq did keep insisting until the bitter end that it had no weapons of mass destruction to declare until the US and its tame puppy the UK, without UN backing, invaded their sovereign state, overthrew their government and discovered --- Yes, that's correct - bugger all, is what they found.

Reading between the lines, and it is difficult when everybody is making so much noise and using so little reason, it would seem that what really pisses the Americans (and the Europeans too if it come to that) off is the idea that any nation could be self sufficient in energy and therefore beyond the threats and blandishments of the soi-disant "big boys". Especially one that already has oil and holds threat over the US. The US and the EU bloc both want to make Iran's nuclear energy programme dependent on their good will and Teheran finds this unacceptable. I think that that is understandable. Moreover I think the US understands, and sympathises with, the idea of energy independence. Just not for a bunch of Arabs.

The depletion of the natural oil reserves of the planet were foretold in 1972 and the US has done nothing in the intervening years to reduce its dependency on this energy source despite its own dwindling supplies. Nothing that is except to destabilise the middle east further, invade a country or two to ensure its continuing supply and deny that burning fossil fuels is a threat to the global environment. It is interesting to note that if you do your research carefully that you can find the "research establishments" that young GWB depends on for his views on global warming and, perhaps not surprisingly they seem in the most part to be sponsored by or offshoots of oil companies.