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Blood for Oil?

I’m a bit surprised to see Josh linking to this. I think the “no blood for oil” critique is about on a par with the “preemption is evil” critique. Both pretty drastically understate the nature of the strategic failure here. After all, if you fight a war for oil, at least you get some oil at the end of the day. People like oil. But we don’t have any more oil than we could have had otherwise. Indeed, we have less. And we didn’t preempt anything. We’ve got nothing! Near as I can tell, the Michael Moore / Ted Rall UNOCAL pipeline didn’t get built either.

In the minds of Bush’s lazier critics we’re now awash in affordable fossile fuels and threats have been pre-empted. Back in the real world, we’ve got diddly squat. It’s a much rawer deal than this crowd understands.

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