On September 16 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire was as dead, theoretically, as its predecessor, the British. Our empire was seventy-one years old and had been in ill financial health since 1968. Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy. --Gore Vidal, Chapter Three of Imperial America (Nation Books, 2005)

On a personal note, landing at Kansas City International Airport the other day, my vision of America altered by my in-flight reading of Mr. Berman's remarkable work, I saw the landscape through new eyes, a landscape I now understood to have been systematically vandalized by the corporatocracy: big box stores, chain hotels and restaurants, strip malls and gas stations, a landscape everywhere repeated across the United States, a landscape we intend to impose upon the world in order to fulfill our destiny as bringer of freedom as expressed through consumption. --Reader Review of Dark Ages America

If Iran is attacked it will have nothing or next to nothing to do with the oil bourse. It will be because the PNACers have targeted Iran, because, like Iraq, it is not a puppet state, and, in the Neocon "mind" thus presents an "existential threat" to the greater Israel that they imagine.

Certainly, when oil is no longer traded in dollars, it is not only the dollar that will collapse. It means that the US --on the bad end of a huge balance of trade deficit --will no longer be able to afford to import goods or services. For a nation that long ago (Reagan years primarily; See Vidal, cited) gave up its role as a manufacturing nation, this collapse will be monumental, catastrophic. The fact that oil had been traded in dollars was the only thing propping up the dollar. That there was a demand for dollars because there was a demand for oil meant that you could continue to buy imported goods with dollars. Now --imagine a world in which no other country need "purchase" dollars in order to import oil! What if oil producing nations agree to accept other currencies? What if they refuse to accept dollars? Go to Wal-Mart or even your local supermarket. Almost everything on the shelves is imported. Imagine a shop owner refusing to accept as payment for anything in the shop your worthless dollars ! As Gore Vidal pointed out, the US empire ended in the eighties, when the US became a net debtor nation. GOP regimes since have only made the situation worse. Just as empire became the business of Rome, empire had become the "business" of the US which no longer produces enough to employ its population let alone export to the rest of the world. Most US consumer goods are imported from China, sold in Warl-Mart, discarded in America. America's best days are over. We live in the twilight of empire.