Cordesman claimeth:
"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.
The article notes that the profits of five western oil
companies have tripled since the war. If that results
from being clumsy imagine how well they would have
done if U.S. policy were dexterous.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
--- Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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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