OIL AND AMERICAN POLITICS

“This is not about oil”, said Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush’s secretary of defence, as America prepared to invade Iraq. Few objects have had greater priority in the Bush administration’s public-relations campaigns than the insistence that the United States invaded, not for any basely selfish or self-aggrandising reason but for one of a series of high-minded motives: to spread American ideas of democracy, to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or to take Saddam’s boot off the throats of the Iraqi people.

There is no need to disbelieve any of those idealistic motives. But the fact is that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is indeed “about oil”.

E quando acabar o petróleo ?