War for Oil? Maybe. . .

I thought I would weigh in on a topic that has been going on off and on throughout the blogosphere.

It's an excellent article from today's Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin (excellent newspaper, by the way), which bascially says the talk about the theft of Iraq's oil is just that, talk.

It's a line of thinking that I hadn't even thought about.

Let's think about this for a second, and do some postulating.

All oil fields in the Gulf region are nationalized. Therefore, all companies wanting to suck up all that oil basically can't. Anything they want, they have to go through the government of that country.

Now, lets examine the War for Oil argument.

Iraq has been at war for as long as I've been alive. Their oil fields are in disarray from war and sanctions. Trudy Rubin writes that it would take 3-4 years to repair the damage and bring the fields up to present-day level. Probably more if Saddam does his scorched earth strategy. Any benifits for us and all that juicy Iraqi oil would have to wait till at least 2006.

Also, Iraq may elect a democratic legislature (when we're done blowing the place up, of course) that doesn't want US help in developing their oil fields. They may turn to our friends, the Russians, or the French. That's of course, assuming that democracy takes hold in a country that has never seen it. Kuwait did just that after the Gulf War. The Kuwaiti royals wanted the US to develop the oil fields, and we did offer, but Kuwait's legislature said "Hell no!" Well, they didn't say "Hell no," I just added that for my own emphasis.

I fully expect Iraq to remain apart of OPEC as well. It's part of their history. Iraq did help found OPEC.