On What Planet?

(Cross-posted at Ezra Klein's.)

It's almost not worth responding to, but Matthew Yglesias points out that Andrew Sullivan is being dumb: "One thing that today's high gas prices strongly suggest is that, whatever else it was, the Iraq war was surely not about oil."

Matt already deals with the obvious: That the US - indeed, the world - has only ever been interested in the Middle East for oil, and Gulf War II is only an extension of that policy. Simply put, it's the Korb Hypothesis: "If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn't give a damn."

That said, there's a lot of obvious counter-examples that, in Sullivan's words, strongly suggest that the war did have quite a bit to do about oil. Recall Bush's speech on the eve of the war:

"And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

Now, it's tempting to see that as an innocuous statement, especially given Saddam's history of torching wells. Of course, those were Kuwaiti wells. I wonder how that statement actually played on the so-called Arab street, however.

Recall also the famously-guarded Ministry of Oil buildings. I don't even think any of this is especially malign. While I said before that I think war waged expressly for oil is an obscenity, a war in an oil-rich country must by definition take that in to account. So if war with Iraq was necessary I don't think it's irrational to plan for contingencies. As Bush said, the oil was going to be a future source of wealth for the Iraqi people.

Of course, we know now that a) the war was entirely unnecessary, a point even Sullivan needs to concede, and b) this administration was never that big on contingency planning anyway. Which leaves us with the question: Why the single-minded focus on protecting the precious, precious oil?

I leave that one for Andy.