Friday, November 03, 2006

The new WMD

Today in Missouri, George Bush went into more length than usual about his frequent suggestion that the Iraq invasion really was about oil --

Imagine the radicals and extremists taking over a country, and they were able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel, whatever it would be, and saying, okay, we'll reduce the price, all you've got to do is surrender. All you've got to do is abandon your alliance with Israel, and we'll lower the price. All you've got to do is retreat.

Three questions: Death and destruction in Iraq won't bring surrender but more expensive oil would? Osama would go to all that trouble just to be able to act like a cartel? And wouldn't he need Sunni fundamentalist extremists in charge of OPEC to do it? Oh, wait ...

UPDATE 6 NOVEMBER: Further analysis of this point via Dan Froomkin (scroll down to Blood and Oil).

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