Word: gulf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recent mess in Pakistan is that it kept a worse mess out of the news: Iran. But that was never going to last, and indeed it didn't. On Sunday, five armed naval units from Iran's Revolutionary Guards aggressively challenged three U.S. Navy ships passing into the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. There were no shots fired or damage caused, but no doubt this was an Iranian reminder to the United States that the Gulf is called the Persian Gulf for a reason. And the Iranians chose Hormuz, the only real egress for Gulf oil, to remind...
...Sunday's incident didn't come out of nowhere. These days in Tehran there is real euphoria that Iran is about to turn back the clock to 1763, the year the first British warship passed into the Gulf and established an uninterrupted Western dominance over one of the most strategic bodies of water in the world. Iranian thinking is that the U.S. will get tired of Iraq, leave, and let fall the first domino in a new Persian empire. When Iranian President Ahmadinejad crowed about the National Intelligence Estimate - the one absolving Iran of building a nuclear bomb - being...
...Iran isn't even bothering to hide its imperial grasp. Or that oil is the key to the Gulf's heart. A contact in a major U.S. oil company told me that Iraq's Shi'a-led oil ministry has been soliciting the company's interest in a couple of Iraqi fields. When the company finally took the bait, the Iraqis coyly suggested that the company might want to first pass through Tehran to get an Iranian green light. It was the only way for the U.S. major to secure an Iraqi property. The company of course declined the invitation...
...just as they maintain that Iran is holding up an Iraqi oil law that would allow the Kurds to open their region to foreign investment. As far as the Kurds are concerned, Iran intends to monopolize every drop of oil exported from Iraq. And maybe one day from the Gulf...
...despite appearances, is not the only country with influence in the cultural field. The case of French architecture is an obvious example. When Paul Andreu builds the National Grand Theater in Beijing, when Jean Nouvel has projects in Brazil or Jean-Michel Wilmotte in the gulf states, when Christian de Portzamparc works in Rio de Janeiro, and Dominique Perrault in Russia, they are operating in countries that will very soon represent major cultural "markets...