The No War for Oil crowd should be very pleased -- it turns out that we didn't go to war for oil after all, according to the BBC:

Iraq's new Oil Minister Thamir Ghadhban has reportedly said that all coalition advisers will leave Iraqi ministries after the 30 June handover. Quoted by the UK's Financial Times, he said that the ministry would reassert full control over the country's lucrative oil industry. ...

"When sovereignty is regained it means that there will be no more US advisers, not only in the ministry of oil, but in every ministry in Iraq," he was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition of the FT.

Of course, the whole "war for oil" meme never had any intellectual heft, anyway. Economists and oil-industry analysts repeatedly told anyone who would listen that we could easily have secured lucrative contracts with Saddam had we allowed him to shrug off the sanctions, especially early on, at much less (financial) cost than going to war. Indeed, doing so would also have ingratiated ourselves with the Europeans, notably France and Germany. A scaleback of our military posture and a free flow of oil from Saddam would also have lowered the price of crude, although we can hardly keep pace refining the oil we buy now.

But now we see the true folly of that anti-war chant. We're returning sovereignty to Iraq and they're sending the American advisors home. A free Iraqi state now makes the decisions on oil leases, and instead of the money going to Saddam's pockets in order to perpetuate a genocidal tyranny, it's funding a representative government and giving all Iraqis an incentive to pull together in support of it. Very soon, the full measure of Iraqi oil production will once again be on the market, only this time all Iraqis benefit, not just the al-Tikriti tribe.

It looks like Bush really meant to free the Iraqis instead of seizing their natural resources. Surprise! But like Jon at QandO, I'm not waiting for an apology, even after the Washington Post pointed out that the UNSC resolution that we wrote specifically keeps us from exploiting their oil fields without getting a lease like everyone else.

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» No War For Oil from Everything I Know Is Wrong
Since we didn't get any oil last time we waged a "war for oil" in Iraq, I was kind of hoping that maybe this time we might get just a little. But no, as Captain Ed points out, [Read More]

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» Oil for Food? -- Oil for the US? from Cranial Cavity
In what must be a slap in the face to those that march, chant, or otherwise embrace the "no war for oil" screed the new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi politely says, go to hell."Today the most important natural resource has been returned to ... [Read More]

Tracked on June 10, 2004 9:21 PM