A War About Oil After All?

Is this war about oil after all?

The oil lay buried there for millions and millions of years before Mesopotamians began tracing the faint outlines of civilization along the Tigris and Euphrates above the Persian Gulf.

It lay untouched for many generations after people learned to make bronze and weapons and silks and war.

Because they still had not discovered oil, people in the cradle of civilization found other things to fight about, in ways that posed no threat to the waters of the gulf or the cormorants who fished in it.

By 1970, when American production peaked, most of the world’s oil was in nations around the gulf and conferred on its owners a power that silks never did--power and wealth worthy of war.

Or so it seemed at least to Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein.

On Aug. 2, he seized and proceeded to destroy his neighbor, Kuwait--which had used its oil money to help finance Hussein’s futile and brutal war against Iran--claiming he was not getting his fair share of the gulf’s oil revenues.

Then more ironies began.

Calling Hussein’s grab a threat to world peace, President Bush responded by launching a diplomatic campaign in the United Nations and dispatching nearly half a million troops to the gulf. He also mentioned that seizing oil was a threat to the American way of life.

Hussein dug in. When a deadline for withdrawal passed, allied planes began bombing Iraq’s bases and industries.

Then, last week, in a despicable act, Iraq opened pipeline valves to begin flooding the Persian Gulf with perhaps 40 times the amount of oil that the tanker Exxon Valdez dumped into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

That oil, which is allegedly essential to the American way of life, was being spilled into the gulf, where most of the cormorants who were trapped in the spill were dead or lay dying.

Washington denounced the act as “environmental terrorism” and diverted bombers from their missions over Iraq to bomb the pipelines that Hussein had seized, along with Kuwait’s oil, to stanch the oil bleeding.

Is this war about oil after all?