Peak Oil is You
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Page added on May 1, 2008
Permanent wars for oil and permanent terrorism
“[We cannot leave Iraq because] extremists [may] be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West . . . and they will do so unless we abandon Israel ” –George W. Bush, November 1, 2006
“When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add 3 million to 5 million barrels of production to world supply,” –Lawrence Lindsey, George W. Bush’s then-chief economic adviser, 2002
“Secure supplies of energy are essential to our prosperity and security. The concentration of 65 percent of the world’s known oil reserves in the Persian Gulf means we must continue to ensure reliable access to competitively priced oil and a prompt, adequate response to any major oil supply disruption.”: — White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” March 1990
When the Bush-Cheney administration took over in January 2001, the international price of oil was about $22 a barrel. Now, nearly eight years later, the price of oil is hovering around $120 a barrel, a more than 500 percent increase.
Thus, as far as oil is concerned, things have not unfolded in Iraq as planned and expected by the neocons in the Bush-Cheney administration. First, they thought that gushing Iraqi oil would pay for the invasion and occupation of the country. Instead, the cash outlay for this adventure is likely to reach one trillion dollars, and the total cost to the U.S. economy will likely surpass three trillion dollars. Second, the price of oil has reached record levels with no top in sight and this is threatening to tip the U.S. and the world economies into a protracted economic recession. This is partly due to the fact that Iraqi oil output has not increased as planned and is rather below where it was when the United States invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003. From a macroeconomic point of view, this ill-advised and illegal war has been an unmitigated disaster.
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