pure speculation

Spengler’s got a must-read column, which answers (speculatively but consistently, as always) a lot of my little question of the last few weeks (specifically, about the vigorous but blink-and-you-missed-them gestures toward peace offered by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, last mentioned here):

Here’s Spengler:

Iran covets the oil reserves of southeastern Iraq, southern Azerbaijan, and northwestern Saudi Arabia. With 30% youth unemployment, 10% inflation, epidemic prostitution and drug addiction, Iran’s fraying social fabric depends on an oil-derived government dole. Within a generation it will have half as many men of military age, and four times as many pensioners. As currently configured, Iran faces economic and demographic collapse eventually. If, as Business Week reports, Iran’s oil exports are falling by one-seventh each year, the reckoning might come sooner rather than later. The theocratic regime is a wounded and dangerous beast, prone to hunt outside its own preserve.  …

“There are two sorts of rat/The hungry and the fat,” wrote Heinrich Heine. The fault line between hungry Iranians and the fat Saudis may take precedence over the civilization divide between Muslims and the West, at least for the time being. That is why the Israelis have rediscovered the 2003 Saudi peace plan. The Saudi kingdom has threatened to intervene on the side of the beleaguered Sunnis of Iraq, and Iran (through Hezbollah) is seeking to overthrow the Saudi-allied government of Lebanon, as well as dominate the rejectionist wing of the Palestinians.

Interesting if even fractionally true.