OIL OIL OIL OIL OIL OIL

Nothing new here, except that there are still people who don't get it - that the most likely reason we are in Iraq is oil, and that the Bush administration isn't going to leave as long as they think there is a chance they can get control of the oil to their oil company cronies.

Both Bush and Cheney came to the White House as oil men.

As all the other excuses for starting the war, and the rosy views of how we are winning it and should keep fighting, are exposed as pr, there is only one solid explanation. I woke up thinking I just had to post something about oil.

For those who are still skeptical and haven't read Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer Prize winning book The Prize, just go read the book. Yes, it's big. But so is our bill in Iraq. Make a sacrifice for America and read the damn book and you'll quickly see how this war fits the pattern of wars the West has waged to secure sources of oil. I'm not dismissing the importance of oil in our world, but it can't be used to justify destroying Iraq and the US constitution. And even Cheney knows that. That's why national security and not oil is the official excuse.


And after starting this post I ran across this NYTimes editorial about the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership today. It underscores the Cheney Administration's rapacious thirst for oil.

This is its first lawsuit against the government, and one it did not undertake lightly — in part because it is not a litigious group and partly because the hunters and anglers who make up the bulk of its membership tend to be largely Republican.

That the partnership is now going to court shows how distasteful the administration’s public lands policies have become and how little they have changed since Vice President Dick Cheney, in his notorious energy report, ordered up a full-court press for domestic oil and gas resources regardless of the environmental consequences. Like other conservation groups, the partnership has never disputed the need to develop supplies of natural gas, nor has it objected to responsible development undertaken at a measured pace with due regard for other values, including the protection of wildlife.

What drove the partnership over the edge and into court was the sheer one-sidedness of the administration’s approach, as well as its reckless disregard for the law, and if that does not get Mr. Kempthorne’s [secretary of interior] attention, nothing will.