Chaotic and/or failed governments are not good at efficiently using oil and other natural resources. At least the Saudi’s seem to know when to ask for foreign help in running their fields. (They’re probably better managed than Mexico’s or Venezuela’s). Hell, I’ve heard that Iran IMPORTS gasoline because of limited refining capacity.

Yes, but there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The administration pretended that it was about democracy and weapons of mass destruction, when it wasn’t about either. Ever since, they have continuously lied about the progress of the war and the tenuousness of the US position. All of that dishonesty sets up Bush and his team for fair criticism.

• Pch101 :
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:34 am
I’m with Mr. Leikanger here, I just don’t understand the denial.
It’s pretty simple:
-The US has little domestic oil, and Norway is running out
-Much of the world’s reserves are in the Middle East and Caspian region
-Consumption in Asia is trending upward quickly
-The US government forecasts that the Chinese will be consuming as much oil as the US by 2035
-Between India and China, they have 1/3rd of the world’s population
-China is earning billions from exporting goods to the US and the west, and hasn’t quite armed up…yet. But once armed, it could field an army substantially larger than anything that the US could offer.
The writing is on the wall. Some day, there is a high likelihood that oil will stop being just another commodity available on the open market for everyone to buy like wheat and sugar, and will become a weapon to be used by these petro-dictators to play off the major powers against each other.
This region is of utmost importance to us. The Iraq war was clearly an effort to secure supplies and establish a presence in the Middle East on the border of Iran so that stable flows to the US and her allies could be ensured in the future. 9/11 provided the perfect opportunity to justify this presence.
If Iraq was exactly what it was, except it was located in a different neighborhood and had no oil, we couldn’t have given a rat’s back end about it. It’s really not complicated at all — oil is of strategic importance to the US and the west, and the powers that be are worried about what could happen, given current trends.
Frankly, they’re right to worry. The Carter Doctrine established that the US would go to war to protect its access to oil. It might have been a stretch to do so preemptively, but it is a longstanding, bi-partisan position that the US makes oil security a high priority.
I understand that the PR spin doesn’t allow the government to actually say this so clearly, but you would think that intelligent, analytical citizens could figure it out just through basic observation. The world is full of despots, but we don’t invade all of them. We need to have a compelling reason, and in the case of Iraq, most of it is because of that juice that lies beneath it.

Ding..ding..ding..ding, we have couple of winners here, with abolutely no sarcasm intended.

50merc and PCH, you guys have absolutely hit the nail on the head.

These “No War for Oil” jerks completely have their heads in the sand. Yes, we as a country need to be pursuing alternatives to being dependant on foreign oil and reducing our consumption. Nationally, we should be pursuing this with an effort that would dwarf the race to reach to moon.

However, until we have achieved that, in order to secure our way of life, we have to secure our sources of oil.

Unless you are going to go and live 100% off the grid and subsistence farm, live off the land etc. you are being a hipocrite to yell “No war for oil”.

If they pointed to what they found, it may only have caused another round of attacks from the left over the original reports being overstated instead of just wrong.

When both sides are fighting over power rather than results, who knows about anything coming out of that rat’s nest.

“War for Oil” is meant to stir up anti war protests be giving the impression that the US is nothing other than a bunch of raiders in long boats coming to take the wealth of others.

“Taking” is “stealing”

If you want to say that we went to Iraq partly because we wanted to ensure that the region’s (not just Iraq’s) oil supplies continued to flow without being held up or robbed by terrorists or potentates, then go ahead, I will agree.

HOWEVER, I don’t think that will look good on a bumper sticker. If you want to cry “No War for Oil,” then you can go talk with the “No appeasement” crowd until you are all blue in the face.

If you want to say “No War for Free Markets, Private Property, or Liberty,” then I don’t think you will get many supporters. Go ahead though.

Lastly, Orian, if you want to sway my mind, don’t quote the Bush adminstration OR the NYT as if they mean anything. Truth is better found by flipping a coin.

I honestly question that. I read a lot of online news from outside the United States. We have a LOT of censorship – and the internet just helps us to peek behind the curtain to the man with the levers that we’re supposed to be ignoring. Whether this is ultimately government censorship, or censorship by those media heads who have their own agendas and ensure we only see the news THEY want us to see, I can’t say.

How is it that the Israeli government has been talking about how the Hussein government moved literally tons of WMD’s to Syria prior to the US invasion, and nobody else listens. Perhaps because nobody wants to hear about it (there is an agenda in place to ensure virtually no such news gets into the mainstream of consciousness), and perhaps because if Israel ignores such facts (if indeed they are true), it is an existential threat.

Next, I distinctly recall seeing Russian news showing American GI’s destroying Iraqi WMD’s IN IRAQ about 2 years go. I mean, I saw photos and saw quotations by US military officers! In fact, I saw similar news reports online from another source, as well. (Can’t recall the country).

As to why these facts are not pointed out by the Bush administration, if they are also true, I can only conclude that there must be some other factor in play here which causes the administration to be mum about it. Obviously, yet another hidden agenda. So much for transparency in government (we can all stop laughing hysterically now…) As to what this could be, I have no real idea, but obviously keeping this agenda quiet is more important to them than just proving themselves to have been right about WMD’s.

We also armed Bin Laden to fight Communism.

In hind sight, neither was a good idea.

Note I don’t hold our military in contempt or slander them. I have the utmost respect for the job they do.

What I don’t agree with is how they are treated most of the time.

And if anyone out there doesn’t know why the US Navy was created (hint: in 1800 a fifth of the US government’s revenues went to appease the Barbary pirates), or why the Marines sing of the shores of Tripoli and are called Leathernecks, I urge them to do a little research. Such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates

On a lighter note, here’s another bumper sticker, which refers to the media-fed demonization of the oil industry: “Please don’t tell my mother I work in the oil business. She thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.”

Here is what they said:

Senator Ted Kennedy, on Sept. 27, 2002: “We have know for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

Vice President Al Gore on Sept. 23, 2002: “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”

Senator Hillary Clinton on Oct. 10, 2002: “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological wapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program…It is clear that, if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

In all fairness, some of those Democrats favored continued sanctions, or limited military strikes, as opposed to an all-out war. But they did believe that he had those weapons, regardless of the “level of proof” required.

Which may explain why Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the war, or why former President Bill Clinton was initially supportive, even though he was attempting to rewrite his own history during the runup to the primaries.

There was the real question as to whether we – or anyone else – wants a hostile, unstable despot who is sitting on a large part of the world’s oil to even have the possibility of developing those weapons.

The Bush Administration was ultimately wrong. Guess what – they weren’t the only ones.

It’s pretty simple:

-The US has little domestic oil, and Norway is running out

-Much of the world’s reserves are in the Middle East and Caspian region

-Consumption in Asia is trending upward quickly

-The US government forecasts that the Chinese will be consuming as much oil as the US by 2035

-Between India and China, they have 1/3rd of the world’s population

-China is earning billions from exporting goods to the US and the west, and hasn’t quite armed up…yet. But once armed, it could field an army substantially larger than anything that the US could offer.

The writing is on the wall. Some day, there is a high likelihood that oil will stop being just another commodity available on the open market for everyone to buy like wheat and sugar, and will become a weapon to be used by these petro-dictators to play off the major powers against each other.

This region is of utmost importance to us. The Iraq war was clearly an effort to secure supplies and establish a presence in the Middle East on the border of Iran so that stable flows to the US and her allies could be ensured in the future. 9/11 provided the perfect opportunity to justify this presence.

If Iraq was exactly what it was, except it was located in a different neighborhood and had no oil, we couldn’t have given a rat’s back end about it. It’s really not complicated at all — oil is of strategic importance to the US and the west, and the powers that be are worried about what could happen, given current trends.

Frankly, they’re right to worry. The Carter Doctrine established that the US would go to war to protect its access to oil. It might have been a stretch to do so preemptively, but it is a longstanding, bi-partisan position that the US makes oil security a high priority.

I understand that the PR spin doesn’t allow the government to actually say this so clearly, but you would think that intelligent, analytical citizens could figure it out just through basic observation. The world is full of despots, but we don’t invade all of them. We need to have a compelling reason, and in the case of Iraq, most of it is because of that juice that lies beneath it.

People seem to forget that the Clinton Administration believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, too. So did Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted in favor of the war. Senator John Kerry and Vice President Al Gore also made public statements to that effect.

Disinformation, to put it politely. A different level of proof is required to back up statements like this administration made in the run-up to the war than what were, essentially, things said by the folks you listed, along the lines of “we think he has some; he hasn’t accounted for his old ones”.

Did the desire to secure oil supplies play a part in the decision as to whether to go to war? Sure…Iraq is locacted in a region where a large percentage of the world’s known oil reserves are located. The ENTIRE DEVELOPED world depends on this oil, not just the United States. If anything, given that we only get about 13 percent of our oil from the Middle East, it’s the rest of the world that depends more heavily on the Middle East for oil supplies.

A case can be made that having this supply disrupted or in the hands of an unstable despot (as opposed to the more stable despots in countries such, as say, Saudi Arabia) is not a good thing for the WORLD, not just the United States.

Contrary to the image of Europe, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Australia, portrayed on this site, people in those countries do lots of driving, they heat or cool their homes with fossil fuels, too, and they use fossil fuels to generate electricity. When they aren’t driving, they use mass transit, which isn’t powered by hamsters or french-fry grease.

In short, their economies depend on a reliable, steady supply of oil, too.

The main exception is France, which relies heavily on nuclear power for electric generation. (Last time I checked, most of those concerned about global warming where also staunchly opposed to nuclear power, with a few exceptions.)

An unstable oil supply hurts them, too. They are also impacted by oil price increases. Just last week a co-worker brought in visitors from Wales, who were complaining about…rising gasoline prices in Great Britain.

Now, we can certainly argue that the Bush Administration botched the war. We can argue that the war should never have been waged in the first place. We can argue that the war has backfired and resulted in higher oil prices, along with a declining dollar (although a declining dollar HELPS American exports).

But the idea that we went to war to benefit Exxon or because Dick Cheney is a shill for the oil industry could charitably be described as what comes out of the north end of a southbound bull at the Pennsylvania Farm Show.

The answer is MUCH more complicated than that…unless, of course, we prefer to base our worldview of foreign policy on slogans and protest signs. Although that doesn’t quite fit in with the idea that all of the war opponents are modern-day Adlai Stevensons, appealing to the “thinking” portion of the population.

The Bush administration admitted less than a year after invasion that Hussein had NO weapons of mass destruction. Not little. None. The country is roughly the same size as the state of California, but the general public was not aware of that little detail. As for SoB’s with WMD, North Korea has one that is much worse and is more of a loose cannon than Saddam ever was, yet we didn’t touch him.

As for your second scenario, they didn’t expect the insurgency that poured in. There is a good article in Time about one of the guys (Sanchez) that ended up taking a fall for Rumsfeld’s mistakes and the rapid pull out that resulted in the cluster that we’re dealing with now. Ideally this mess would have been in and out, but that didn’t happen. So yeah, it’s hard to get the oil out of there when you screw up the planning so badly you have to do whatever you can to save face both at home and abroad.

So, in a nutshell, we screwed ourselves to the point we can’t “Take” the oil.

Supply matches demand. There is no sound reason why prices should double with flat demand and adequate supplies.

When the market notices that supply isn’t going up despite increasing demand, the assumption is that the supply is very inelastic. Since the demand is obviously very inelastic as well, it’s not unreasonable at all to see very steep price increases for very small supply/demand imbalances. The market is, in a sense, trying to discover “how much do I have to charge you to make this chunk of marginal demand go away”?

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Greenspan, who was the country’s top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that “the Iraq War is largely about oil.” In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive,” he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601287.html

we’re talking about out Murican way of life here, and as Dick “shooter” Cheney sagely noted it’s non-negotiable, ie, no matter how many many swarthy people we have to murder, torture, rape, imprison, widow, orphan, dispossess or refugee, it goddamned worth it. when one of our brave freedom fighters mows down (sorry, liberates) a bunch of worthless Iraqi civilians from a safe distance while I’m stuffing my face at TGI Fridays do I notice it? of course not! fuck ‘em!

You bet they didn’t piss away the last boom. They also didn’t suffer nearly as much in the late ninteties when the price hit rock bottom and they were shutting down wells and telling the US government they were not interested in any new offshore leases (which led to the present accusation that they get huge subsidies because Clinton made special deals to get them to go after those leases so he could get the up front money).

They also aren’t all that crazy about starting all sorts of new projects right now. Why? I dunno, maybe because every government in the world seems to renig on the deals. Maybe because they are being slandered in congress for making what is at best an average return on investment.

Lastly, the idea that the persent production is all we can get is a bit farcical. Almost all the hurdles to increased production are government created.

And sadly, lots of oil comes from the Mideast, a region run by fanatical and/or thuggish regimes, and rich (from oil) and crazy (from ideology) enough to produce much more terrorism and other mischief than can be consumed locally. It was for good reason that Bush and everyone else, from Clinton and Gore to Chirac and Putin, were alarmed about WMD in Saddam’s hands. Mideastern oil itself isn’t a life-and-death matter for the US, but a conflagration in the Persian Gulf would be devastating to many countries and therefore to America. So we, the world’s policeman, are there. Believe it or not, there really are people who want to do harm to us, and their demands are non-negotiable.

It’s silly to think the administration would promote a claim about WMDs that it knew to be false. And it’s foolish to ignore the numerous other grounds (stated by Congress as well as the White House) for military intervention.

Now let’s get back to talking about the price of gas. My thinking on this is colored by the recollection that the oil business has had busts as well as booms. The 80’s were terribly hard on my part of the country. I fondly remember a bumper sticker that said “Oh Lord, please send us one more oil boom. I promise to not piss it all away next time.”

How about we compare the two likely stories.

1. They were worried about WMD, knew he was an SOB, compared the pro’s and con’s, started a campaign to sell the idea to the people, and invaded. They then found very little WMD, so they started spinning, because just cutting and running would have terrible results and really be unfair to the Iraqi people.

2. They wanted to invade Iraq to take over it’s oil fields and give them to their friends in the oil business so they made all that stuff up. Only they can’t now figure out a way to steal all the oil, and instead are having to pay the Iraqi’s for it and the net loss is insanely huge.

Sorry, until we actually TAKE the oil, none of the “WAR for OIL” slogans make any sense. I suppose you could say they went based on a misguided idea that the invasion would stabilize oil prices and guarantee the free flow, but I think they weren’t that stupid.

Now, you wanna have the whole argument about whether they are evil geniuses or just idiots? Hint, you can’t have it both ways. Hint number two, I can actually play devils advocate and destroy the right wing’s stupid propaganda as well. Please, don’t repeat crap, it’s just crap.

Of course they weren’t saying that – they knew they couldn’t get the war under that premise. It was WMD, then that didn’t pan out after the war started. Then it was to remove a dictator when there are far worse leaders in the world. It doesn’t really matter at this point since we’re stuck in this mess we created, but they knew full well they couldn’t sell the US public on a war for oil.

Does this make anyone else think of the printer industry? Can you imagine in 2060 that shell, bp, etc are giving away chevy aveos for free so you can buy gas?

Also: re pizza delivery:

IN brazil, the equivalent (income ratio to gas prices) would be $30-$40/gallon here. Sure there are tons of delivery boys everywhere, they just ride 125cc motorbikes. IT’s not uncommon to see bottled water guys with 20+ gallons of water in on the back of their bike. for delivery to offices.

Hey Mike, we don’t WANT Quebec. We have enough trouble with illegal aliens and legal aliens alike who can’t/won’t speak English in our own 50 states now. Sorry if that sounds un-PC, but it is the truth.

You speak English over there? We’ll I’ll be…. who’d a thunk.

The US has plenty of natural gas, coal, and solar, wind and nuclear potential. If we start adjusting now to an electron economy versus an oil one, there will not be rioting in the streets–I hope.

Coal-to-gas was used extensively by the Germans in WWII: it powered the Luftwaffe. Think of what we could achieve today with our technology!

Build a few hundred nuclear power plants in the Nevada desert next to Area 51. Hell, put in a few more refineries now for the oil we’ve got left. Not many NIMBY’s out there. Pipe in cooling water from Canada or Alaska (they’ve got plenty) and let the pipeline parallel–then branch off–the NAFTA highway which has already been planned and engineered. Use the nukes for electricity or hydrogen generation

MIT has invented a membrane that increases fuel cell efficiency by 50%; IBM has developed a concentrator for solar cells that increases output from 20W to 200W per cell.

There is a lot of money to be made at the dawning of this energy revolution…

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4020