No blood for oil

Yep. And that's exactly how it turned out.

Iraqi officials said yesterday that the interim government has assumed full control of the country's oil industry before the June 30 turnover of sovereignty from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

"Today, the most important natural resource has been returned to Iraqis to serve all Iraqis," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said. "I'm pleased to announce that full sovereignty and full control on oil industry has been handed over to the oil ministry today and to the new Iraqi government as of today."

Actually, it would be naive to think that oil has absolutely nothing to do with it. But it's really a part of the larger picture, not just the war in Iraq. One of the goals is to remove oil as a source of funding for terrorism. Saddam was funding terrorism, using profits from oil sales that were being funneled from the so-called Oil for Food program. Now that the oil reserves of Iraq are out of his hands, this goal has been partially achieved. It is hoped that the government that results in Iraq from our efforts will be friendly toward us. But I believe that they should be selling us their oil for a fair price and using the profits from those sales to rebuild their country. Although I do think it would be nice for some of those profits to be used to offset our costs in liberating Iraq from Saddam, and the costs we've incurred so far in reconstruction (sort of like treating those costs as a "loan" to Iraq), I'm not going to insist on it. Besides, US oil companies are most likely going to be involved with exploiting the oil resources anyway which will contribute to our economy just as it contributes to Iraq's.

It's also true that we currently depend on oil from the Middle East since we can't produce enough from our own wells and refineries to fulfill demand. The more I think and read about this issue, the more I agree with those who say that the first step in weaning ourselves from Middle East oil is to build more refineries and tap the ANWR. Alternative energy sources will be great if we develop them, and I encourage such research. But availability of such sources on the scale required are far enough in the future that increasing domestic petroleum production is necessary if we are to accomplish the goal relatively soon.