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Article: Fighting for oil?(geopolitics of policy on Iraq)
- Article from:
- The National Interest
- Article date:
- June 22, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The National Interest, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IT IS HARD to find any public statement from an American official justifying the ouster of Saddam Hussein in terms of oil. Yet oil had everything to do with regime change in Iraq--and it would be hard to find an official elsewhere, and certainly not in the Middle East, for whom the linkage would be anything but direct.
Both the Gulf War and the ouster of Saddam a dozen years later were essentially about oil. Saddam would not have been a threat to the status quo in the region in a way vital to U.S. interests if it were not the center of the world's oil supplies. Nor could he have mustered the wherewithal to build a powerful military machine or to have developed ...