I honestly have no idea. There is a debate raging at work. I’ve seen some chat on the boards about what’s causing the rising prices as well.
We claim to have invaded to look for WMDs but it seems to be common knowledge that we are there for control of oil. If that is so, why has it gone so wrong (the oil part - I know the other part)?
Would gas be $4.50 now if we had not gone into Iraq?
Ceteris paribus, I believe the dollar would be more valuable, so I vote no.
Enlighten me. What actions have we undertaken that would result in you or anyone else thinking that the U.S. has tried to take control of Iraq’s oil?
This doesn’t say we were going to take the oil, but it does indicate that we expected oil from Iraq:
EDIT: Weird. Link won’t work in the post. This is the one I used: http://www.fas.org/sgp/temp/natsios042303.html Just got up. No coffee.
Johnny, that quote is from April 23, 2003. The administration was still billing this as a war that would pay for itself. And claimed it would cost substantially less than the Marshall Plan (he quotes a 1.7 billion figure!) None of this has come to fruition. They talked about it, but haven’t seen a cent.
NurseCarmen: That’s true. The point was that the administration was expecting oil revenues to pay for reconstruction. That implies that oil would be pumped and sold. Since the U.S. were the ‘liberators’, the implication is that we’d have some sort of control over the oil.
But I think that the reason prices have risen so much is that any instability in the Middle East tends to raise prices. Bush’s War is a major cause of instability in the region. So if we didn’t invade I think prices would not be as high as they are now.
Gas is $4.50 now because preventing that from happening wasn’t part of the invasion. But it could be:
The US uses about 400 million gallons of gasoline a day. As we are going to have to pay $4.50/gallon anyway, why not reallocate those funds? Let’s all continue to pay the $4.50, but rather than use that entire amount for fuel, how about we use $1.50 for fuel and consider the other $3.50 as a tax to fund an occupation of the entire region, or at least to fund our siezure and defense of the oil fields.
That $3.50 * 400,000,000 = $1.4 Billion/day. Sure, we still get raped at the pump, but now it’s an investment and now WE control the world’s oil supply. Play nice and you get some love at the pump. Fly a jet into one of our buildings or systematically poison our children’s toys and you’ll end up doing your part to make our friends’ lives just a little better.
I swear this world went to the dogs with the end of Western Colonialism.
Who is this “we”? Are you talking about yourself and your good friend Dick Cheney who was going to generously share his profits from the control of Iraqi oil supplies with you just because you voted for him?
No. When will most Americans admit that petrol is bought and sold in U.S. dollars and the U.S. dollar has plummeted toward worthlessness and appears to have no bottom. At least 50% of the increase in the price of oil can be attributed directly to the massive printing of U.S. dollars under this Republican admin. Sometimes they print $40 billion in a single month. Ever notice that Fed budgets are barely ever debated in Congress anymore? They don’t need to - they just print the money. Where did the billions come from to send checks out to every address recently - Hell, just print what we need!! The U.S. public has spent & created personal debt like drunken sailors for years, and their governments have done the same from Municipalities to Counties to States to the Pentagon to the Feds. Wall St. has stolens billions ($33 Billion in bonuses in NY alone Dec 2007) from their banks and several will collapse after the u.s. election. Stop blaming the rest of the world - your currency is worth little or nothing - how long should the rest of the world compensate for your bad governance by buying worthless little pieces of paper called dollars?
Apparently we had our fingers in the Oil pie even before we invaded Iraq, with the food for oil program. We had sanctions against Iraq while Saddam was in power and we didn’t want the Iraqi people to suffer because of him, so we were trading oil for food. I’m not sure how this would affect the price of gas now if we didn’t invade and kept this as the status quo. (I have to get back to work…)
Absolute hogwash–there is nothing unusual in the growth of the United States money supply over the past several years.
They were borrowed, just like the government borrows to fund the deficit every year. Borrowing isn’t the same as printing money.
Wasn’t it sung from the heavens before we got into the war that the oil profits were going to pay for the entire war? I believe it was Paul Wolfowitz.
Maybe. It’s impossible to quanitify the actual price changes, but Iraqi oil production is now finally above what it was at the start of the war by ~750,000 bpd. However, if all we cared about was oil production, simply ending the embargo likely would have led to a much higher number.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Absolutely not. Gas was fine until we invaded that country. I don’t understand how anybody can’t see that. It’s obvious as the sky is blue in the daytime.
One time right after Katrina hit I mentioned to my conservative buddy, “Well, gas is so high because they gotta pay for that war somehow.” He about shit his pants, he said, “No, no, no, gas is high because of the storm flooding the pipelines yada yada yada…” and I was quiet for a second and then said, “so how do you explain gas going from $1.41 a gallon to $3.15 a gallon BEFORE KATRINA HIT?”
He didn’t know what to say.
For the pure and simple reason that we were not there to “steal oil from Iraq” as I have heard so many, many liberals claim. And they still continue to claim it, despite the clear, logical concept that if we were stealing oil from Iraq, we’d be paying a buck a gallon or less at the pump.
Our invasion of Iraq has made the Middle East less stable, and increased instability in that region generally causes oil futures to go up. We can’t measure the exact amount that is due to the Iraq War, but I think it is undeniable that it has played a role in the run-up we’ve seen in the last few years.
But I doubt that oil would be all that much cheaper without the invasion since much of the rise we have seen is only in the last two years or so, and we have seen oil prices drop at times since 2003.
I’ve been thinking of starting a similar thread, but with a subtle difference:
Would gas be $4.50 now if we had gone into Iraq correctly?
Feel free to define ‘correctly’ as you see fit, with the exception of not having gone in the first place.
To me, it means going in with two major efforts in the buildup. (I’m just going to assume competency and success.) First, what if rather than cowboying it in, what if we were able to build up a coalition similar to that of the first Gulf War? I don’t think it would have been as strong in terms of focus of purpose, but a solid, non-browbeating diplomatic effort was clearly missing.
Second, what if during the buildup, we actually planned for the power vacuum and chaos that erupted shortly after the invasion? That is, what if we’d arranged to avoid the quagmire that is Iraq today. Clearly there would be an insurgency of sorts, but the scale of it today is (IMHO) due to poor post-invasion planning.
So? So I think the main outcome would be much greater leverage/influence over oil-producing countries to increase production. If Iraq was producing as a pro-western, willing to buck OPEC limits, supplier, I’d imagine Saudi Arabia next, perhaps Kuait, etc. Driving wedges between Argentina and Iran and the like would be easier if we hadn’t squandered the good will over the last eight years.
While I don’t think “we went into Iraq for their oil” is as linear as it sounds, I think the above analytical seed was definitely on the minds of those who got us into it. Imagine a Bush presidency where gas prices were a bit lower, and moderate peace was breaking out in Iraq and the Middle East–he’d be competing with Reagan for conservatives accolades.
Oil went up quite a bit right after the first Gulf War was initiated. Much more of an increase than right after the second war started. Link.
