What do you guys think?
He sacrificed his soldiers for USA's own good and power and
oil.
Bush Cites Oil As Reason to Stay in Iraq
By Peter Baker, Washington Post
Greeley, Colo.- During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq,
President Bush and his aides sternly dismissed suggestions that the
war was all about oil. "Nonsense," Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld declared. "This is not about that," said White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer.
Now, more than 3 1/2 years later, someone else is asserting that
the war is about oil - President Bush.
As he barnstorms across the country campaigning for Republican
candidates in Tuesday's elections, Bush has been citing oil as a
reason to stay in Iraq. If the United States pulled its troops out
prematurely and surrendered the country to insurgents, he warns
audiences, it would effectively hand over Iraq's considerable
petroleum reserves to terrorists who would use it as a weapon
against other countries.
"You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got
control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for
Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them
saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run
your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following
would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to
expand our dark vision.' "
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic
blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its
alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested
that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of
oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a
barrel."
Oil is not the only reason Bush offers for staying in Iraq, but his
comments on the stump represent another striking evolution of his
argument on behalf of the war. The slogan of "no blood for oil"
became a rallying cry for antiwar activists prior to the March 2003
invasion and angered administration officials. "There are certain
things like that, myths, that are floating around," Rumsfeld told
Steve Kroft of CBS Radio in November 2002. "It has nothing to do
with oil, literally nothing to do with oil."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Saturday that Bush's latest
argument does not reflect a real shift. "We're still not saying we
went into Iraq for oil. That's not true," he said. "But there is
the realistic strategic concern that if a country with such
enormous oil reserves and the corresponding revenues you can derive
from that is controlled by essentially a terrorist organization, it
could be destabilizing for the region."
Some analysts, however, said that Bush is exaggerating the impact
of Iraq's oil production on world markets. Iraq has more than 112
billion barrels of oil, the second-largest proven reserves in the
world. But it currently pumps just 2.3 million barrels per day and
exports 1.6 million of that, according to the State Department's
tracking report on the country, still short of what it produced
before the invasion.
That represents a fraction of the 85 million barrels produced
around the world each day and less than the surplus capacity of
Saudi Arabia and other Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, meaning in a crisis they could ramp up their wells to
make up for the shortfall, analysts said. The United States also
has 688 million barrels of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
enough to counter a disruption of Iraqi oil for 14 months.
Even if Iraq did not sell oil to the United States, it would not
matter as long as it sold it to someone because the international
market is fungible and what counts is the overall supply and
overall demand, according to analysts. If Iraq cut off exports
altogether, it still would not have the dire effect on the world
market that Bush predicts, they said. The price of oil began rising
dramatically in 2002 as the confrontation with Iraq loomed, but
many factors contributed, including increasing demand by China and
problems in Nigeria, Venezuela and elsewhere.
The world, in fact, has already seen what would happen if Iraqi oil
were cut off entirely, as Bush suggests radicals might do. Iraq
effectively stopped pumping oil altogether in the months
immediately after the invasion. And yet the price of oil has never
topped $80, much less come anywhere near the $300 or $400 a barrel
Bush cited as a possible consequence of a radical Iraqi regime
withholding the country's oil.
"They're a minor exporter," said Edward Morse, managing director
and chief energy economist at Lehman Brothers. "They have potential
to be a greater exporter. But it's ludicrous to suggest someone
could hold the world hostage by withholding oil from the market,
especially a regime that needs money."
Disruptions of oil supplies certainly affect the markets, but not
as drastically as Bush suggested, Morse said. He noted that
Venezuela's capacity has fallen by 1 million barrels a day since
President Hugo Chavez came to power there and yet it has not given
him any geopolitical leverage over the United States even though he
is an avowed Bush foe. But Morse agreed that Iran, for example,
could "play mischief" because it already effectively controls much
of Iraqi oil in the southern part of the country.
Fratto, the White House spokesman, argued that even if radicals
could not move the markets dramatically with Iraqi oil, they would
use the country as a base to topple other governments in the Middle
East such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which would give them "a lot
more oil to blackmail with."
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