The next Iraq on the way?

It seems that the crude oil market is destined to be the market of this year. Since NATO's proposal of a series of actions against Iran's nuclear experiment carried out later last year, the issue considering oil price has never lost the attention of mainstream media. We've already seen that in last two months shot up over nearly 20 percent as EU announced its freezing of various transactions with Iran among its members. Iranian governors counterattacked immediately by cutting its oil supply to Britain and France and threatned further ban on oil exports to other "unfriendly" European countries. And this morning the oil price spiked on global market to $108.25 (the three-week high) but soon pulled back. Some experts anticipated that Iran's oil export might drop by 300,000 barrels per day this month.

This little variation may not be quite considerable yet it is delivering out some messages. Recently Iranian government stated publicly a breakthrough on producing Uranium with concentration of 20% or more. It should warn all the NATO countries to some extent that since they prohibited every route they can imagine to prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology, Iran's progress has never halted. The western countries cut its smuggle of uranium from Argentina, kept the secret of high-speed centrifuger and banned all the potential exports of raw material of building nuclear facilities. They did everything they can to stop Iran but none of these worked. This kind of accomplishment could add confident to Iran so that it might furtherly shutdown oil supplies to more western countries. And since America and the EU find difficult to block Iran, is it possible that another Gulf War is under the table? We still remember that Iraq, a decade ago, was under siege for exactly the same reason--nuclear. Will the destiny of Saddam pass onto Ahmadinejad?

Oscar Zhang