Why the Iraq War is NOT about Oil....

A good summary demonstrating that the anti-war line is just nonsense...

While proponents of the view that "it's the oil, stupid" offer little evidence to support their claim, the evidence to the contrary is ample. Take, for example, the report of the 2000 National Energy Policy Development Group, also known as the Cheney Report. This policy paper, composed by no fewer than eight Cabinet members, reflects the pre-9/11 mindset within the Bush White House on how to achieve energy security. Yet it has almost no mention of Iraq and its vast oil reserves. The opposite is true: The report warns against concentration of world oil production in one region and calls for the United States to diversify its energy supply away from the Middle East.

Despite the involvement of Saudi nationals in the 9/11 attacks, the Bush team did not for one moment contemplate invading oil-rich Saudi Arabia. Instead, it chose to invade Afghanistan, the country with the least amount of oil in Central Asia. Furthermore, the administration decided to end the decades-long American military presence in Saudi Arabia, a country that produces five times as much oil as Iraq, and move U.S. bases to Qatar, which produces one-tenth as much as Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, which has essentially run out of oil - a questionable move for a nation whose supposed main driver was oil.

The administration's actions before the 2003 invasion of Iraq raise another question. At the time, Iraq was exporting hardly any oil and was under a strict sanctions regime that prevented international companies from investing in its ailing oil industry. For profit-driven companies such as Exxon and Halliburton, the sanctions were an impediment to business, and they lobbied the administration to review them. The last thing they wanted was the uncertainty associated with war. Yet since his inauguration in early 2001 and up until the war's start in March 2003, President Bush was persistent in maintaining the sanctions regime, providing competitive advantage to non-American companies bidding for Iraqi oil. Mr. Bush's decision to go to war against the interests of Big Oil rather than lifting the sanctions pokes a huge hole in the Iraq-is-about-oil narrative.

Before the war, the United States imported very little oil from Iraq, and oil stood at $30 a barrel. Today, only 4 percent of U.S. oil imports come from Iraq, and oil is at $80. With 160,000 American troops in Iraq, America's oil companies are nowhere to be seen. Russian and Chinese companies are enjoying the spoils of war. If the "Iraq is about oil" cohort is right, and Iraq was truly about oil, then our failure there is even bigger than we thought.