Hmmm, perhaps we'll attack Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming next. After all, there is the Green River Formation spreading some 16,500 square miles.

>>>>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.
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>>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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>Jim, I didn't say that oil justified the war. Justification is a different, and often philosophically complex, argument. I said it must surely have been a major reason for it.
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>>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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>Yes we are in some ways and in other ways we're better. It's in the human condition - necessity is the mother of invention. We haven't been needing an alternative enough to force a change in consumption patterns.