>>Oil WAS comming steadily from Iraq to the rest of the world (Oil4Food etc)
>>By invading Iraq, US just made sure that THEY are the ones holding the oil faucets there.
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>Iraq was clearly becoming a more unstable and threatening entity in that region. The oil may not have been in immediate danger but it was then one of several factors. The latest war is simply an extention of the first war. Is there any doubt in anyone's mind that if there was only sand and camel dung there that no country would give a damn about it? The world requires stability in that region so long as that region has oil.

So it shouldn't be long before Venezuela and Bolivia are "freed". Then possibly Azerbaijan and a few states around it.
I'm not too anxious to have blood oil at my disposal. I find it quirky that Iraqi oil will be available on the "free market" (well, maybe) at the standard "market price" yet the REAL cost-per-barrel will be in the hundreds of dollars. The ultimate in what MBAs call "externalizing costs".

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>>>Let's not try to shroud these events in terms of a humanitarian effort to enlighten the people of the world. This is a war motivated by economics. Nothing wrong with that per se as we all need to work and earn a living and energy is just a necessary part of that equation.
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>>How you can possibly agree with that ??
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>What I am agreeing with is that oil is a necessary part of the world's economies. And that a desire to have stability in a region which supplies a large part of that oil is understandable. Furthermore, I think one of the bigger reasons for the war was motivated by economics.

Some thinker called oil "excrement of the devil", alluding to its consistency and all the trouble it causes in the world. He had it right!
I remember, when I was working with some folks in San Francisco around 1972 and President Nixon said that it was necessary to become far more energy efficient and severely reduce the dependence on oil, saying to those people that this could be a huge economic revolution that benefitted everyone around the world. Sadly other forces prevailed and "we" are in a worse spot today than we were then.

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SNIP