Here’s a fellow in the Asia Times who is astonished that the United States let Russia and China get Iraq’s oil.
BEIJING – Former United States vice president Dick Cheney, ex-defense minister Donald Rumsfeld and assorted US neo-cons will have plenty of time to nurse their apoplexy. One of their key reasons to unleash the war on Iraq in 2003 was to seize control of its precious oilfields and thus shape a great deal of the new great game in Eurasia – the energy front – by restricting the access of Europe and Asia to Iraq’s staggering 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
After at least US$2 trillion spent by Washington and arguably more than a million dead Iraqis, it has come to this: a pipe dream definitely buried this past weekend in Baghdad with round two of bids to exploit a number of vast and immensely profitable oil fields.
The columnist is completely baffled by our letting the oil auction be conducted by the Iraqis and the rights sold to the highest bidder. That is indeed baffling if you insist, as all proper liberals do, that Iraq was about oil. In fact, it was not. The invasion will undoubtedly go down as one of the great blunders of this century but, like other paths, it was lined with good intentions. Bush was an idealist and determined to stop Saddam and his nuclear weapons. That he was wrong about Hussein’s possession of those weapons doesn’t make the war “all about oil”. It never was.
Oil is a fungible commodity
US has some of world’s most clever oil&gas/energy guys…at majors like Exxon or entrepreneurs like XTO or drilling tech cos. like Schlumberger….and clean-tech VCs in SiliconValley
Suspect US will fare quite well vs competitors from Germany or Jap or China or anywhere else….high IQ and innovative tech and entrepreneurial culture are hard to beat by merely playing the low-cost, low-quality game (esp in context of a commie regime)
Sneaky bunch, these Muslims, but they’re learnin’.
Gave contracts to low bidders.
Bush did not claim nukes as a reason to invade Iraq. He claimed weapons of mass destruction; ties to terrorists; and violation of UN resolutions.
That is correct, good intentions can equal disaster. Such as a free war, and we’re told to go shopping. Or a prescription drug benefit, and no way to pay for it either. He fell for the Cheney line “deficits don’t matter”, so let’s not raise taxes and get elected. What a mess we are in, and it is not about oil. It is about not having to pay for anything.
The invasion of Iraq was definitely about oil. Yes, it was about other things, too–atoning for Daddy Bush’s half-measures in the Gulf War, punishing Muslims for 9-11 (Afghanistan wasn’t convincing enough), trying out some new weaponry and technology, and so on. But Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that the Iraq War had nothing to do with oil was a ludicrous claim. Anyone who cares enough to do just a little research can easily find what Dick Cheney thought and said, years earlier, about the marvelous quality and quantity of Iraq oil, about the necessity of gaining access to that oil, of taking control away from Saddam Hussein.
…. so then, where is the oil? Oh I forgot, we can’t let reality get in the way of a good slander.
CF! Don’t be so naive! Of course oil was part of the equation – not all, but most definitely part. The thought pattern – A rogue, totalitarian, terrorist nation with nukes and oil is most unacceptable indeed.
I think the invasion was primarily about building a base of operations in the region, and projecting force from there to influence the behavior of the surrounding regimes: Saudia Arabia, Syria, Iran, etc. Iraq was chosen for both its strategic geographical location, AND its oil. Had either been absent, perhaps an alternative base would have been chosen. The idea was to have the oil revenues fund the base of operations. It failed because the project was underfunded, and based on bad intelligence.
For some of the Iraq War’s proponents, it probably was mainly about oil. For Bush, who knows. Maybe it was to settle a personal score. Check this out starting at 1:10 in (turn up the volume)
And then read this:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/5780.html
Everyone….Iraq was a “war”…against whom? Not the Iraqi’s….against Al Qeda. We drew them into a proxy battle in Iraq. Kept ‘em out of the US.