The Overlooked Euro Intervention

“We have withstood ten years of war, of air strikes, of attacks by cruise missiles and of sanctions that have sought to impoverish us and starve our people. Now comes the decisive counter-attack. The Iraqi people have declared war upon the dollar, the secret weapon of our enemies.

“Henceforth, our foreign currency reserves and our foreign trade, our oil prices and our future investments, will be denominated in euros, the new currency of our friends in Europe.

“Already, our French and German and Italian friends have negotiated new oil exploration agreements that will take effect as soon as the Zionist-American blockade is lifted in the United Nations. The long history of technological and military-industrial cooperation with our European friends will also then resume.

“Our friends in Europe and Asia are the main market for our oil. Indeed, except for the tiny and dwindling reserves of the North Sea, the Europeans depend utterly upon the Arab world and our Russian friends for their energy supplies.

“And we share with our Russian, Asian and European friends a common interest in challenging the rule of the almighty dollar.

“None of us wants to live in a unipolar world, dominated by a single and Zionist-dominated nation. We are all stunted in the shadow of what our friend Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, calls ‘the hyperpower.’ The way to undermine this military colossus is to strike at its weakest point, the currency that it has forced upon us all.

“We and our friends in OPEC remember the first, heroic step we all took with our Declaration of Independence in September 1971. We responded to the U.S. decision to abandon the gold standard by our formal Resolution refusing to tolerate payment in devalued dollars. Our second Declaration of Independence must be to abandon the dollar entirely, and shun this weapon of our enemies.

“We call upon the Arab world, all members of OPEC, and our friends in Russia to follow the glorious lead of the Iraqi people and join us in the embrace of the euro.

“Even in the short term, we expect to make a happy killing on the currency markets, as the overvalued dollar declines and the euro recovers its inherent strength. Better still, so long as the U.S. Federal Reserve joins the rest of the G7 central banks in more interventions to boost the euro, the Americans will be paying for our enrichment.

“The euro is the soft underbelly of the dollar. The Revolutionary Council of the great Republic of Iraq, true to our heritage as the fount of human civilization in the fertile valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, now strikes through the soft flesh of our enemy’s heart. Our purpose is to liberate not only the Iraqi people, not only our Arab brothers, but all the nations that have so long labored under the dollar’s dominance.

“We have withstood ten years of economic war against our people, ten years of sanctions aimed at our children and our mothers. We have faced the harshest assault of the world’s so-called economic superpower. Very well. Economic war it shall be — and the euro is our chosen weapon.”

— A former bureau chief for London’s The Guardian, Martin Walker based this fictional speech by Saddam on a September 26 statement issued by his Finance Ministry.