The failed mission to seize Iraqi oil

[warrens]

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish - rather than enhance - America's access to foreign oil.

An occupation floating on a sea of oil
Oil was certainly not the only concern that prompted the American invasion of Iraq, but it weighed in heavily with many senior administration officials. This was especially true of Vice President Dick Cheney who, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighted the need to retain control over Persian Gulf oil supplies when listing various reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein.

Nor is there any doubt that Cheney's former colleagues in the oil industry viewed Iraq's oilfields with covetous eyes. "For any oil company," one oil executive told the New York Times in February 2003, "being in Iraq is like being a kid in FAO Schwarz." Likewise, oil was a factor in the pre-war thinking of many key neo-conservatives who argued that Iraqi oilfields - once under US control would cripple the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and thereby weaken the Arab states facing Israel.

Still, for some US policymakers, other factors were preeminent, especially the urge to demonstrate the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine, the precept that preventive war is a practical and legitimate response to possible weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions on the part of potential adversaries. Whatever the primacy of their ultimate objectives, these leaders shared one basic assumption: that, when occupied by American forces, Iraq would pump ever increasing amounts of petroleum from its vast and prolific reserves.

SNIP

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GI22Ak01.html

Miserable failure, all around, that fucking punk.

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. Why does he hate America?

[damntexdem]

2. They may not have it pumping, but they haven't failed yet.

Let's see if the Iraqi constitution is actually ratified, with its provisions putting the oil into U.S. hands.