“No War for Oil!” by Ken Silverstein in The American Prospect (July 19, 2002) has a critical discussion of such claims. An article mentioned by Silverstein, “Pipeline politics taint U.S. war” from the Chicago Tribune (March 18, 2002) is also still available online. So is George Monbiot’s piece “America’s pipe dream: A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil” in The Guardian (October 23, 2001). Right here on the SDMB, we had the thread “It's a war for oil, Tony Benn tells protesters” from November 2001; and Tony Benn’s article “Tackle terror at its roots” (also from The Guardian, November 11, 2001) is also still accessible. From Benn’s article in The Guardian:
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether by our silence, we may be acquiescing in the perpetration of crimes against humanity in that those who have already suffered so much are now suffering even more because their land is urgently needed for a pipeline to get Caspian oil to the US market.