Yes, it's the oil - and not just Iraq's

As Jim Holt wrote in the London Review of Books last October, It's the Oil that drove the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its long-term plans for that country. "Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.... In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success," writes Holt. The massive size of Iraq's oil resources, the push to legalize U.S. companies' access to them through the draft oil law and separate Kurdish deals, and the construction of a giant U.S. embassy in Baghdad and five new super-bases to prepare for permanent military occupation (justified by sectarian friction and al Qaeda), support his assessment.

Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. deputy defense secretary, had confirmed as much in 2003: "We just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." Ex-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir, The Age of Turbulence, published in September, that "the Iraq war is largely about oil".

Chanting "No Blood for Oil," the anti-war movement won wide support before and during the early stages of the war by exposing these aims. But after Sunni-Shi'a sectarian violence became rampant in 2006, many became disoriented, hoping that U.S. troops could keep the peace.

The opposite is true. While an immediate goal of U.S. policy is to take control of Iraq's oil resources, the bases and the Sunni-Shi'a struggle also are building blocks of the larger U.S. project of controlling the Middle East as a whole, as observed by Edward N. Luttwak in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in January 2007. "It was the hugely ambitious project of the Bush administration to transform the entire Middle East by remaking Iraq into an irresistible model of prosperous democracy. Having failed in that worthy purpose, another, more prosaic result has inadvertently been achieved: divide and rule, the classic formula for imperial power on the cheap. The ancient antipathy between Sunni and Shiite has become a dynamic conflict, not just within Iraq but across the Middle East, and key protagonists on each side seek the support of American power.... Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S."

So, the U.S. is well positioned to continue its plunder of Iraq and to occupy the balance of power in the Middle East. The Iraqi nationalists who oppose the U.S. are still regrouping to overcome the secular divisions, and the U.S. antiwar movement remains peripheral. Under these conditions, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's promises to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq have remained vague. Look for them to renege if either becomes president.