LA Times - Breaking News - Showdown between USA and Iran

[dixiegrrrrl]

130. Also...the countries we have been "challenging" are because of the currency issue.

They have challenged the US dollar as the reserve currency for buying/selling oil.
In Iran's case:
from Wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_oil_bourse
The Iranian Oil Bourse (IO is a commodity exchange which opened on February 17, 2008.
It was created by cooperation between Iranian ministries, the Iran Mercantile Exchange and other state and private institutions. The IOB is intended as an oil bourse for petroleum, petrochemicals and gas in various currencies other than the United States dollar, primarily the euro and Iranian rial and a basket of other major (non-US) currencies.
The geographical location is at the Persian Gulf island of Kish which is designated by Iran as a free trade zone.

During 2007, Iran asked its petroleum customers to pay in non US dollar currencies.
By December 8, 2007, Iran reported to have converted all of its oil export payments to non-dollar currencies."

and
from Project Censored:
The U.S. media tells us that Iran may be the next target of U.S. aggression. The anticipated excuse is Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. William Clark tells us that economic reasons may have more to do with U.S. concerns over Iran than any weapons of mass destruction.

In mid-2003 Iran broke from tradition and began accepting eurodollars as payment for its oil exports from its E.U. and Asian customers. Saddam Hussein attempted a similar bold step back in 2000 and was met with a devastating reaction from the U.S. Iraq now has no choice about using U.S. dollars for oil sales (Censored 2004 #19). However, Iraq’s plan to open an international oil exchange market for trading oil in the euro currency is a much larger threat to U.S. dollar supremacy than Iraq’s switch to euros.

While the dollar is still the standard currency for trading international oil sales, in 2006 Iran intends to set up an oil exchange (or bourse) that would facilitate global trading of oil between industrialized and developing countries by pricing sales in the euro, or “petroeuro.” To this end, they are creating a euro-denominated Internet-based oil exchange system for global oil sales. This is a direct challenge to U.S. dollar supremacy in the global oil market. It is widely speculated that the U.S. dollar has been inflated for some time now because of the monopoly position of “petrodollars” in oil trades. With the level of national debt, the value of the dollar has been held artificially high compared to other currencies.
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-irans-new-oil-trade-system-challenges-us-currency/