Bush's Blood for Oil: Liberals Left Puzzled

Another Liberal, another failed belief

Not that the Left ever gets much right in life, and here we have yet another example of this:

Those who claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to get control of the country’s giant oil reserves will be left scratching their heads by the results of last weekend’s auction of Iraqi oil contracts: Not a single U.S. company secured a deal in the auction of contracts that will shape the Iraqi oil industry for the next couple of decades. Two of the most lucrative of the multi-billion-dollar oil contracts went to two countries which bitterly opposed the U.S. invasion – Russia and China – while even Total Oil of France, which led the charge to deny international approval for the war at the U.N. Security Council in 2003, won a bigger stake than the Americans in the most recent auction. “[The distribution of oil contracts] certainly answers the theory that the war was for the benefit of big U.S. oil interests,” says Alex Munton, Middle East oil analyst for the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, whose clients include major U.S. companies. “That has not been demonstrated by what has happened this week.”

That might have been the thinking of U.S. oil giants, which largely stayed away from last week’s bidding, and which have failed to negotiate oil deals with Iraq’s government outside of the public auction process. Iraqi officials say they are not awarding contracts based on political considerations, but simply a straight comparison of prices and production targets. “The bidding was extremely tough,” said one official in Baghdad, in an email. “My guess is that [the U.S. companies] could not match the offers from others.” In Iraq, at least, the victor has no special claim on the spoils of war.

It should be remembered, whether you agreed with going into Iraq or not (a majority of U.S. senators did – most not even bothering to check out the evidence) that it would be tough to find examples in history where one country invades another, deposes its leader, allows its people to establish a democracy, and keep their most treasured asset – oil.  After WWI the French seized the Saarland from Germany, then a crucial center of industry and coal.

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