Was the Iraq War About Oil?

While I don’t think it was ever about American companies “stealing Iraq’s oil”, there’s a pretty large over-all economic benefit to Western economies in having a large oil exporting Western-oriented country that plays (mostly) by free-market rules.

Such a regime will have much higher oil exports (thus lowering prices world-wide) and will tend to honor contracts, not expropriate Western companies, etc., all of which benefit the West and Western economies.

I’m not going to speculate whether that was ever possible or whether Saddam Hussein, like the Shah in Iran, imposed a veneer of Western-orientation that disappeared once their repression was removed. In all likelihood, the situation is way too diverse to make any generalization.

Iraq was restricted from selling its oil because of the sanctions. Therefore not all the oil was being sold. Iraq was exported a billion barrels of oil less at the start of the war than they had before the Kuwait invasion.
Also Iraq was thought to have untapped oil reserves equal to the amount of proven reserves. Iraq had the second highest amount of proven oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia.
If a fundmentalist regime took over Saudi Arabia and restricted the flow of oil, the price would skyrocket and destroy the world economy temporarily. Having a country with nearly as much oil reserves being pro western and inclined to pump as much as possible would mitigate this danger.
Also being in charge of that much oil gave the Hussein regime a huge budget for weapons and the proximity to other nations with huge amounts of oil gave the regime a motivation for trying to invade other countries.
Thus while the Iraq war was about oil it was not about trying to capture oil, but making sure the supply was not interrupted.

@sourcreamus,
Having a country with nearly as much oil reserves being pro western and inclined to pump as much as possible would mitigate this danger.
Saddam Hussein didn’t need to be pro-Western to be pro-making money. And, by the way, it would not have been that hard to get him to be pro-Western, as he was during the Reagan era: just get rid of the sanctions.

Couldn’t the war have been about oil even if the economic impact was negligible? A cynical (non-nuanced) view holds that the war was only fought to enrich a few players. This “war-as-rent-seeking” view allows for little gain for the economy as a whole, but the policy is still entirely driven by oil.

@MikeP: it’s true as far as it goes, but a problem with the theory is that the U.S. was quite helpful in reestablishing Iraq’s oil industry.

@David Hendersen: It’s a very good question. I remain unclear on what the *theory* is about the Iraq War being “about oil”. What does that even mean? I can’t argue for or against it because I don’t even see what the theory is supposed to be.

As best as I can tell, “it’s about the oil” is just something you say if you want to sound wise. If you have one, you’ll want to stroke a large grey beard while you say it.

I meant that a Western-oriented nation will have full access to Western capital markets and technology (through firms) to increase output significantly.

I consider Iran and Venezuela as a an example of declining production as a direct result of its anti-Western sentiment and policy.

Note, that increased oil production does not *necessarily* mean that the citizens as a whole will be better off (there was a reason Chavez was popular and the Shah fell), but it does benefit the West.

As someone else said, it ‘being about oil’ is so vague as to be meaningless. Saddam Hussein had twice invaded his neighbors; Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.

According to Norman Schwarzkopf’s book, satellite photos showed Iraq was going to push out of Kuwait into Saudi Arabia. Those photos, when shown to the King of Saudi Arabia convinced him on the spot to authorize American troops to enter his kingdom and drive Saddam back to Iraq.

Saddam showed no evidence of having wised up by 2003. In fact he seems to have been providing disinformation to the West indicating he had nuclear weapons, thinking that would prevent his country being invaded. His bad luck, we believed him.

Iraq having large oil deposits enabled Saddam’s aggression. So, is that ‘about oil’?

I think the war was only about oil to the extent that we are interested in the area because of oil. The GW Bush war against Iraq was almost an inevitable result of the first Bush war. The sanctions happened because Saddam Hussein wasn’t sufficiently abashed about his earlier invasion of Kuwait. The sanctions had to end somehow, because everybody on both sides didn’t like them. I’m not sure how else they could end other than in war.

All this came about because the U.S. kicked Iraq out of Kuwait. The U.S. doesn’t intervene in less “interesting” areas. There have been several wars in the Congo area that the U.S. has stayed out of. The U.S. intervened in Kuwait, and eventually kicking out Hussein proceeded from that.

Yes, it both was and wasn’t about oil, very obviously.

Obviously…

[] It *wasn’t* because, just for starters, if the US really wanted cheap oil from Iraq we wouldn’t have embargoed the oil we and everyone else were getting from it at the start. Cutting ourselves off from what we were supposedly trying to get.

It would have been a whole lot cheaper just to have Saddam keep pumping out all the oil he could for us all, as he wanted to do, than to block his exports of it, destroy his oil fields, fight a whole war, and then try to rebuild a new oil export industry out of the industrial/ social/ political ruins. Just to get the oil we were already getting to begin with.

That’s a heck of a way to get cheap oil!

Moreover, the oil lobby in the USA doesn’t even have the power to get the Keystone pipeline built to import oil from Canada, which the Canadians want to and are waiting to sell to us — yet it is supposed to have the power to drive a major war to seize it from Iraq?

I mean, c’mon.

[] It *was* because the USA doesn’t care the proverbial rat’s tail worth about dictatorships like Saddam’s all around the world, leaving them happily in place to abuse both their own populations and their neighbors as they will. The USA cared so greatly about Saddam only because he and Iraq sat in a critical linchpin position in a geographic area of critical geopolitical importance to us and indeed the entire world.

And what makes events in that area – a desolate, backward wasteland in the eyes of the rest of the world until only about 80 years or so ago – so vitally critical today? Only one thing: all that oil over there.

There is no contradiction between these two truths, as indeed there cannot be a contradiction between two factual truths.

Seeing them fit together cleanly as they do just requires being able to look at the detailed processes at play in the situation with “nuance” as you say, while appreciating different meanings of “about oil” as Patrick Sullivan said.

Not that mass-market American political thinking, driven by one-liner marketing of political positions, is much open to such.

I paid close attention to what Colin Powell and others in the administration said, and I remember distinctly thinking the goal of the war was to create a democracy in the Middle East to encourage the others. WMD et al were justifications for the action, but the goal was democracy. The left was as much an agent of misinformation as the Bush administration, constantly talking about Saddam and 9/11 as if Bush was leaning on this. Much of the public believed there was a connection, but the left didn’t attack the public for being wrong, they made it sound like Bush made this argument, and since people trusted Bush…….

As for whether it is ultimately about oil, I suspect yes. If there wasn’t oil in the Middle East, it would garner as much attention as central Africa.

My interpretation of statements like Abizaid’s and Cheney’s list is the same as Jim Glass’s point #2, namely that the war was about oil indirectly. We don’t care what those countries do, except that actions leading to instability in that region threaten the overall oil supply. It’s not just the pumping of oil, but also the use of the Suez as a shipping lane.

But the direct causes of the war were likely not about oil. Instead, we wanted to get rid of a major source of instability (Hussein) and cultivate new territory for our armed forces, with our presence in Saudi being increasingly problematic. I think the analysis was that 9/11 was made possible partly by our presence on Islamic holy ground. The possibility of adding a second Western-style democracy to the region (along with Israel) was also attractive.

Why do so many commenters on this thread think there’s no oil in West/Central Africa?