ZeroHedge has an excellent guest post up just now entitled “Middle East Chaos: What To Learn And What To Expect” which is well worth having a read through to get a rounded view of the political history of the region.

As a taster, the excerpt below has the story of the UK actions in the region which resulted in Oil no longer being priced in Sterling and the Suez Crisis :

Déjà Vu All Over Again…

For those who really want a comprehensive sense of what is happening in the Middle East and why, I suggest a look into the last major Egyptian revolution of 1952. At that time, Britain was still the preeminent western power in the Arab world, and its control of the oil supply was absolute, much like the stranglehold the U.S. has enjoyed for many decades. Oil was pegged to the British sterling and any trade in crude required a conversion to the British currency. In fact, it was often said that the British Empire’s power after World War II was entirely dependent on its reserve currency status in oil markets. Any of this beginning to sound familiar?

In 1952, a revolution against the Egyptian puppet monarchy and its British overseers burst seemingly from nowhere, led by a group called the “Free Officers Movement”. In reality, the insurrection, fed by years of corrupt Aristocratic rule, was initiated and in some cases funded by both U.S. and Soviet agencies in tandem! In 1951-1952, nationalist police officers backed by the U.S. and Russia began supporting fedayeen terrorist groups using false flag attacks to weaken the region (is this sounding even more familiar?). Interestingly, this era was the birth of the so called “Muslim Brotherhood”, a group which has suddenly resurfaced in media discussion today.

Riots spread through Cairo, King Farouk was overthrown, the British were eventually run out, and their control of the Suez Canal was lost. But the story doesn’t end there…

The British and the French wanted the Suez back (at least that’s what they claimed), for control of the Suez meant control of Middle East oil markets. A plan was initiated by the two European powers to take back the canal using an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip as a spring board. This time, Israeli agents were used by the British to conduct false flag attacks, which were presented as a pretext for Israel to move against Egypt. The British and French followed by landing troops near Cyprus and Algeria.

The plan would have worked, except for one thing, the British were financially weak after two world wars and were completely dependent on American investment in their treasury debt. In response to the British action, the U.S. along with the UN threatened to halt investment in British debt and to stop price support of the Pound Sterling. This led to the eventual fall of the pound as the world reserve currency, and the rise of the dollar.

Official history portrays this move by the U.S., Russia, and the UN, as an attempt to undermine the long reach of the English. It is rather convenient however that the pound was dethroned just as plans for the European Union were beginning to be implemented in the early 1950’s. It seems to me that the British elites were fully aware that their futile attempts to hold onto the Middle East would result in the fall of the Pound; it was simply the British people’s turn to be taken down a few notches, and centralized. The similarities between the British Empire’s decline over Middle East oil in the 1950’s and our decline over Middle East oil today, are startling.

If history was to repeat itself, I would guess that the U.S. will soon be embroiled in political or even military operations to control the Suez, and retain its dollar peg to oil, which will illicit a negative response by international investment, causing central banks to dump their U.S. treasury investments and the dollar as a reserve currency.

Think of it as a grand theater meant to amuse only global bankers…

A thoroughly recomended antidote to our own pitiful media reporting.