We need to be honest about Iran – and how our rampant greed for oil is causing mayhem | George Monbiot

I realise this is a serious breach of etiquette. But could we perhaps abandon good manners and contextualise Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? The intense western interest in the Middle East and west and central Asia, sustained for more than a century, and the endless attempts by foreign governments to shape and control these regions, are not random political tics. They are somewhat connected to certain fuel sources situated beneath the ground.
Trump’s war aims are typically incoherent: apparently incomprehensible even to himself. But Iran would not be treated as an “enemy of the west” were it not for what happened in 1953, when Winston Churchill’s government persuaded the CIA to launch a coup against the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The UK did so because Mossadegh sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company: to stop a foreign power from stealing the nation’s wealth. The US, with UK support, tried twice to overthrow him, and succeeded on the second attempt, with the help of some opportunistic ayatollahs. It reinstated the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum, later BP.
Fury about the 1953 coup, combined with ever-more vicious repression under the shah’s dictatorship, triggered the revolution of 1979, which was captured by the ayatollahs, with horrible consequences for many Iranians. They would not be running the country were it not for our governments’ violent crushing of democracy for the sake of oil.
Take a step back from this history, and you see something else that should be obvious. The conflation of capitalism with “free markets” is one of the most successful lies in human history. The historical and ongoing plunder of resources; the police, armies and death squads deployed against those who resist; the shifting of profits from less powerful nations to the major powers; the intimidation of labour; the conning of consumers; the extraction of rent; the dumping of costs on the living planet: all this is the opposite of “free”. It’s highly coercive and extremely expensive.
Much of the time there’s little sign of a market, either. Land, commodities and labour are, in many cases, simply stolen. Public resources, whether oil reserves, forests, water systems or railways are given (or sold at a fraction of their value) to private monopolists. The rich are bailed out by the state when they run into trouble, while the poor must sink or swim. “Free market capitalism” is a contradiction in terms.
The world’s military power exists in large part to deliver the profit from resources – especially oil – to banks and shareholders, commodity traders and asset managers, hedge funds and private equity companies. For the same purpose, the infrastructure of persuasion – lobbyists, media, social media algorithms – is mobilised to ensure the most amoral, sadistic and bellicose people are selected as leaders, as they will keep oil and other commodities flowing for the benefit of capital, whatever the human cost may be. Their opponents are demonised, alternatives dismissed as “unrealistic”, “unpopular” and “unaffordable”.
This is why we consistently underestimate other people’s desire for change. For example, one study shows that 89% of the world’s people want more action to stop climate breakdown. Yet the same people believe they’re a minority. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, surveys consistently showed that a vast majority hoped to emerge into a better world, where health, wellbeing and environmental protection took precedence over economic growth. But governments spent billions on restoring our dysfunctions.
As the hydrocarbon industries and their financial backers find themselves threatened by green technologies, their grip on governments and the media has tightened. They’ve poured vast sums into climate denial and public dissuasion campaigns. Politics has become harsher, less open and less tolerant. The democratic recession is in large part driven by fossil fuel interests. The entire planet suffers from the resource curse.
Oil did not cause capitalism, but it has massively extended and empowered it. Reduce our dependency on oil, and we disrupt some of the world’s most violent and exploitative relations. We defuel dictators and war machines, coups and assassinations, invasions and nuclear threats. It’s not everything of course: there will still be water wars, land wars and mineral wars to be fought: after all, the military machine can’t just sit there rusting. But it’s a lot.
We would also defuel the greatest violence human beings have ever waged against each other: the degradation of all our lives through climate breakdown. The two emergencies – political and environmental – are one. We need to put ourselves on an anti-war footing with the urgency that nations have traditionally put themselves on war footings: an emergency programme to get fossil fuels out of our lives, faster and further than any government is currently planning.
A crucial intervention is the National Emergency Briefing, whose forthcoming film, hosted in cinemas by volunteers across the country, will press the government to explain our predicament properly, and mobilise for full-scale action. If you worry about the cost, consider this. The government’s Climate Change Committee estimates that the additional expense of a single fossil-fuel price spike on the scale of 2022’s is roughly the same as the entire cost of net zero by 2050. The price shock caused by Trump’s attack on Iran is likely to be even greater. We get nothing in return for oil spikes, but we get a new, more secure and cheaper energy system in return for the net zero programme.
I don’t mean to suggest that defeating the fossil fuel machine is easy. Capital will use everything it has to stop us. This is what Extinction Rebellion discovered in the UK, as vicious new protest laws were drafted to shut it down. This is what the Standing Rock campaigners in the US found, when they sought to stop an oil pipeline from crossing their land. It’s what Earth defenders in the global south discover even more brutally, as paramilitaries gun them down. Control over resources is the driving force of politics. Democracy, at the moment, is the lightshow played on the castle walls.
Concentrated fossil power leads to concentrated political power. Had we been less dependent on fossil fuels, there might have been no President Trump, no President Putin, no ayatollahs, no Prime Minister Netanyahu. Fossil fuels push the world towards autocracy. Overthrow our demand for them, and we overthrow much of the current tyranny. Greener, cleaner, cheaper, kinder, fairer: what a beautiful world we could have.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist