How much of the Bush administration’s incessant battle cry for war with Iraq is motivated by its desire to gain control of Iraq’s oil fields?

“Regime change” to a graciously pro-U.S. government installation would permit the privatization of Iraq’s state-controlled oil resources, a virtual petroleum smorgasbord for U.S. oil companies and free the reigns of OPEC monopolization.

More specifically, Iraq possesses the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, estimated at 112.5 billion barrels, or 11 percent of the world’s total. Moreover, many experts believe that Iraq has massive untapped reserves, putting it nearly on par with Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading OPEC producer and coincidentally the country where most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were actually from.

According to the Washington Post, the United States is using the promise of access to Iraq’s oil as a geopolitcal leverage bar in its negotiations with Security Council members. Furthermore, the Bush administration has many close ties to the oil industry: both President Bush and Vice President Cheney worked in the oil business.

In all, forty-one senior Bush administration officials were former oil company executives or have substantial stockholdings or other financial ties to the industry.

Nevertheless, the hawkish Bush administration strategists prefer to play stupid and acknowledge the potential for windfall profits gained by U.S. oil companies’ unfettered access to Iraqi oil as a merely “unintended consequence” of “democratization” and winning the “war on terror,” rather than a terroristic central motivation based on the profit motives of “Big Oil” elites.

Unfortunately, our nation’s forces have already bombed thirty-six sites and begun terroristic “psychological warfare” just last month.

They were just getting a little “head start,” as one administration official said.

How much more American and Iraqi blood (including that of Iraqi women and children) must be shed in the struggle for control of Iraqi oil reserves?

Call or e-mail your representatives and senators and tell them you support the continuation of rational U.N. inspections, negotiations and the lifting of anti-humanitarian sanctions. Lastly, tell them: “No more blood for oil.”

Paul Goodman

Senior

Sociology