Addicted to oil

At the very end of Plen of Ameck, Bob Woodward's account of the events leading up to the invasion of trag, the author asks President Bush, How would history judge his Iraq war! In one respect the question was misguided History does not judget analyses, and above all it looks for causes. In doing so it applies the general principles of all scientific investigations it frames hypotheses based on the observation of previously observed patterns of behaviour. In the case of the USA, the most frequently observed pattern which emerges from a study of i foreign policy over the past eighty years is a fundamental and abiding concern for, and involvement in, the geopolitics of oil

Nevertheless, on 15 January 2003 the British Prime Minister Tony Blair derided as conspiracy theory' accusations that the coming war on Iraq would be in pursuit of oil. Similarly, two months later, a leading article in the US foreign affairs weekly, In the National Interest, declared that "Nothing demonstrates the political and moral bankruptcy of the American liberal left more clearly than the current attempt to portray military action against Iraq as "for the oil" Yet millions of people throughout the world continue to believe that oil was indeed the most important factor in accounting for the USA's invasion and occupation of Iraq

Addicted to Oil is a preliminary attempt to show why those millions of people are correct. I shall argue that the invasion of Iraq was indeed for the oil". although not for the reasons usually attributed to this 'oil theory by its opponents. There was never any intention to 'steal Iraq's oil': but control and domination can be achieved without the direct appropriation of Iraqi ail reserves by US citizens