The Failed U.S. Mission to Capture Iraqi Petroleum, by Michael T. Klare

It has long been an article of faith among America´s senior policymakers -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil -- a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today.

Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region. American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf.

When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States.

This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush´s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish -- rather than enhance -- America´s access to foreign oil.

An Occupation Floating on a Sea of Oil Oil was certainly not the only concern that prompted the American invasion of Iraq, but it weighed in heavily with many senior administration officials. This was especially true of Vice President Dick Cheney who, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighted the need to retain control over Persian Gulf oil supplies when listing various reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any doubt that Cheney´s former colleagues in the oil industry viewed Iraq´s oilfields with covetous eyes.

"For any oil company," one oil executive told the New York Times in February 2003, "being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz." Likewise oil was a factor in the pre-war thinking of many key neoconservatives who argued that Iraqi oilfields -- once under U.S. control -- would cripple OPEC and thereby weaken the Arab states facing Israel. Still, for some U.S. policymakers, other factors were pre-eminent, especially the urge to demonstrate the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine, the precept that preventive war is a practical and legitimate response to possible weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions on the part of potential adversaries.