Critics of military intervention in Iraq sometimes allege that the dispute is really about oil. The response is usually defensive, along the lines that troops will be sent to risk their lives for more high-minded objectives like upholding the authority of the United Nations in relation to weapons of mass destruction and human rights.
Yet the potential conflict must be, in significant part, about oil and economics. It is neither irrational nor unworthy to put them at the centre of the debate.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has acknowledged as much. The futures of Iraq and its Gulf neighbours are important, because of oil, in a way that those of Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe and Peru are not.
One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to note that US net oil imports of around 10.6 million barrels per day are at their highest level ever and increasingly from the Gulf. Government projections show them growing substantially.
