The United States Oil Fund and
several other oil ETFs may be benefiting from a report that was out
last week highlighting Pentagon approval for a funding request with
the following statement:
"The Department has an Urgent Operational Need (UON) for
the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high
threat environments. The MOP is the weapon of choice to meet the
requirements of the UON."
MOP stands for Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a giant bunker
buster bomb that may be the only way to destroy buried nuclear
facilities in Iran. The request was for just
under 70 million dollars and is mostly described to speed up the
completion of the previous program.
Separately, a recent well read article by famed international
journalist Robert Fisk pointed out that Saddam Hussein didn’t
make it past a few months after deciding to sell oil in
Euros. Iran made a similar decision last
month.
A week ago, Iran appeared to have finally made a concession to
the international community by agreeing “in principle”
to send its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France, to ensure
that the material is not further enriched to a point where it can
be made into a bomb.
Iran is led by a group of individuals who are widely believed to
have manipulated their own country’s recent election and
violently put down citizens in opposition to their regime. It
is particularly important to note that the Iranian leaders are
considered religious fundamentalists and are untrustworthy
according to their own citizens. That, along
with the Iranian president's views on Israel and the Holocaust,
suggests the Iranian regime is just as
unreasonable as Saddam Hussein’s government, making
successful diplomacy unlikely.
The push to speed up these bombs may suggest, among other
things, that the American administration now sees a window of
opportunity to strike against a very unpopular government.
Most analysts believe that oil prices would shoot up since Iranian
supply would likely be interrupted.