Excerpt:
...the tightness in oil inventories (which freemarketeers invoke to 'splain the spike in oil prices whenever Cheney growls) isn't some Natural Law we have to just live with, but rather the result of a conscious policy by oil companies to suppress supply, reap unprecedented profits, and miserably fail, by the way, to reinvest those bazillions into increased refining capacity.
The other is by Jack Miles, the Pultizer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, who wrote a tremendously illuminating and deeply depressing piece on TomDispatch.com called "Endgame for Iraq Oil?" The Great Game that Bush and Cheney have really been playing all along in Iraq -- making war not for WMDs, or for Regime Change, or for Freedom Dominoes, or for Israel, but rather for "access to the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, 200 to 300 million barrels of light crude worth as much as $30 trillion" -- may soon be lost. If the Iraqi government makes good on its intention, by December 31, 2008, as stated by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, to replace the existing UN Security Council multinational security force mandate with a conventional bilateral security agreement with the US, then "the oil game will be up." With no multinational mandate, Iraq -- or its parts -- will be free to cut oil exploration deals with anyone it wants. Why, for example, wouldn't "a new, Iran-allied, oil-rich, nine-province Shiite Iraq" cut a deal "with ready-and-willing China? Will any combination of American military and diplomatic pressure suffice to stop such an untoward outcome?"
So the ultimate irony in Iraq, on top of the ultimate tragedy in Iraq, may turn out to be, as Jack Miles puts it, this: "Blood for oil may never have been a good deal, but so much blood for no oil at all may seem a far worse one."
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