America Needs to Talk About The “O” Word: Oil

  Alright, America. It’s time to talk about the “o” word.
  No, not that one. I mean the one we really avoid talking about. The one we’ll do shocking things to get. Our most wanton, shameful secret.
  Oil.
  We need to talk, because all our excuses for invading Iraq have come apart like philanderers’ alibis for motel afternoons. Now it’s time to come clean.
  Americans and oil: We’ve got a thing going on.
  Of course, we never meant to hurt anybody. But admit it: Sometime before the invasion, you thought something like, “Even if there’re no WMDs, it’s a good thing to sack Saddam – and it wouldn’t hurt to pay less at the pump.”
  So we went along. Maybe we had misgivings, but we didn’t join those few protesters in the park. We answered “No War For Oil” with rationalizations ranging from “It’s not that simple” to “One 9/11's not enough for you people?”
  We more or less fell for the administration’s lines: Osama links, yellowcake, anthrax-laden drones, intercontinental missiles.
  They never mentioned petroleum.
  And if we brought it up, it was like discussing honeymoon intimacies at a church supper. One shock-and-awe day, I confessed to a friend – a Vietnam-protesting lefty liberal – my worry that the whole thing boiled down to oil.
  “I can’t believe you just said that,” he huffed. “It’s so simplistic.”
  “But,” I asked meekly, “what’s the one thing you can take out of this huge mess – terrorism, Iraq, Israel, the Middle East, America – that changes everything?”
  “9/11!” he hissed. “9/11 changed everything!”
  “Well, no. It’s not new, people hating us because we support rotten governments for oil’s sa –”
  “Go wash your mouth out!”
  OK, he didn’t say that, but he meant it. Talking about post-9/11 policies in terms of oil was like reducing romantic relationships to sex.
  How crude.
  But what’s the one element you could take out of the mating game that would change everything?
  We like to focus on mating’s romantic elaborations, rather than its imperative essence. And we’re free to do that: Assuming we’re single and childless, we’re only playing with our own lives.
  Similarly, Americans would like to focus on romantic, heroic reasons for invading Iraq – on avenging 9/11, promoting democracy, fighting terror – rather than on the real one.
  But we can’t.
  We can’t, credibly, because all the lies have been exposed.
  We can’t, morally, because we’re playing with many millions of lives.
  So it’s time to talk about the “o” word. About all the “former” oil company operatives directing this war. About the only Iraqi facilities we protected from looting (hint: not hospitals, not banks, not alleged WMD sites). About the only reason America pays more attention to Iraq than it does to, say, sub-Saharan Africa. About America’s 20-plus million barrel-a-day habit, and who’s paying for it.
  About the only word that can explain all this administration’s decisions.
  Alright, not the only one. We also need to talk about that “r” word we just ran into: re-election.

--- HistoryBuff