Washington Post, March 16, 2008
A Crude Case for War?
By Steven Mufson
It's hard to miss the point of the "Blood for Oil" Web site. It
features one poster of an American flag with "Blood for oil?" in
white block letters where the stars should be and two dripping red
handprints across the stripes. Another shows a photo of President
Bush with a thin black line on his upper lip. "Got oil?" the headline
asks wryly.
Five years after the United States invaded Iraq, plenty of people
believe that the war was waged chiefly to secure U.S. petroleum
supplies and to make Iraq safe -- and lucrative -- for the U.S. oil industry.
We may not know the real motivations behind the Iraq war for years,
but it remains difficult to distill oil from all the possibilities.
That's because our society and economy have been nursed on cheap oil,
and the idea that oil security is a right as well as a necessity has
become part of our foreign policy DNA, handed down from Franklin D.
Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush. And the war and its
untidy aftermath have, in fact, swelled the coffers of the world's
biggest oil companies.
But it hasn't happened in the way anyone might have imagined.
Instead of making Iraq an open economy fueled by a thriving oil
sector, the war has failed to boost the flow of oil from Iraq's giant
well-mapped reservoirs, which oil experts say could rival Saudi
Arabia's and produce 6 million barrels a day, if not more. Thanks to
insurgents' sabotage of pipelines and pumping stations, and foreign
companies' fears about safety and contract risks in Iraq, the country
is still struggling in vain to raise oil output to its prewar levels
of about 2.5 million barrels a day.
As it turns out, that has kept oil off the international market at
just the moment when the world desperately needs a cushion of
supplies to keep prices down. Demand from China is booming, and
political strife has limited oil production in Nigeria and Venezuela.
In the absence of Iraqi supplies, prices have soared
three-and-a-half-fold since the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003.
(Last week, they shattered all previous records, even after adjusting
for inflation.) The profits of the five biggest Western oil companies
have jumped from $40 billion to $121 billion over the same period.
While the United States has rid itself of Saddam Hussein and whatever
threat he might have posed, oil revenues have filled the treasuries
of petro-autocrats in Iran, Venezuela and Russia, emboldening those
regimes and complicating U.S. diplomacy in new ways.
American consumers are paying for this turmoil at the pump. If the
overthrow of Hussein was supposed to be a silver bullet for the
American consumer, it turned out to be one that ricocheted and tore a
hole through his wallet.
"If we went to war for oil, we did it as clumsily as anyone could do.
And we spent more on the war than we could ever conceivably have
gotten out of Iraq's oil fields even if we had particular control
over them," says Anthony Cordesman, an expert on U.S. strategy at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies who rejects the idea
that the war was designed on behalf of oil companies.
But that doesn't mean that oil had nothing to do with the invasion.
Says Cordesman: "To say that we would have taken the same steps
against a dictator in Africa or Burma as we took in Iraq is to ignore
the strategic realities that drove American behavior."
full:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/14/AR2008031403376.html
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