All that said, the United States never rests assured of getting the oil it needs. The country imports half the oil it consumes, and of that, half comes from the Middle East. Middle Eastern oil is not only plentiful but also cheap to find; exploration in the desert costs only about $1 a barrel as opposed to $10 or $12 a barrel in places like Africa, the Arctic and the deep ocean. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once told Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko that a Soviet move on the oil-rich region would justify our use of nuclear weapons. Ironically, the U.S. today spends three to six times more on military means to secure the Middle East ($30 billion to $60 billion, depending on how you calculate it), than the dollar value of the oil it imports from there, according to Snider. The petrogeology of the planet -- diminishing reserves in the North Sea and the difficulty of extracting oil from the Arctic, the oceans and the Amazon basin -- suggests the Persian Gulf will be more rather than less important in the future.

In a rhetorical slip of the type that got him fired, Larry Lindsey, former chairman of the White House National Economic Council, quantified the link between American economic interests and open access to Iraq's oil reserves: "When there is a regime change in Iraq [and a subsequent end to sanctions], you could add 3 million to 5 million barrels of oil production to world supply" daily, he told the Financial Review last fall. The United States burned about 20 million barrels of oil every day of 2001, so assuming that all of Iraq's production went to the U.S., it could provide as much as a quarter of American needs. Lindsey calculated that the consequent drop in energy prices would add around a half to three-quarters of a percentage point to the U.S. economic output. Bush, having seen what happened to his father's numbers when a weak economy eclipsed a quick war in Iraq, knows Lindsey's growth figures are crucial for 2004.

But Lindsey didn't say when that extra 3 million to 5 million barrels would hit the oil markets. After more than a decade of war and sanctions, Iraq's oil infrastructure is in such lamentable condition that it might take an infusion of as much as $20 billion to keep it going at its current low levels of production, says Youssef Ibrahim, who covered oil and the Middle East for almost three decades for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and who now works at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. To boost the Iraqi oilfields to their pre-1991 production might cost another $30 billion and take years. That, in turn, requires a stable, competent and friendly government in Iraq.

"Is there a thought that one of the important benefits [of war] is that we can get cheaper oil? Yes," says Ibrahim. "Are they right? No. What they're attempting to do is occupy Iraq, put a friendly government in, and over a long period of time have this country become as friendly as Saudi Arabia has been. Now, whether they can actually do that, the answer is a point blank, big capital-letter No."

Iraq is too fractured and unpredictable, Ibrahim says, and it has zero experience with political or economic freedom. The notion of a stable, democratic, market-oriented government in Baghdad is a pipe dream. "Will any company plunk a billion dollars and 300 employees into Iraq, knowing that they won't be safe and that at end of the day the commitment they made might not be delivered on?" Ibrahim asks. "I don't think so."

So what does Big Oil have to gain from a war in Iraq? There is a temptation to say that Bush and Cheney, being oil men, are waging war to feather the nest of their cronies in the oil patch. After all, the oil industry gave more than five times as much to Republicans in 2000 as to Democrats. But Big Oil craves one thing above all else: stability. The oil business is so capital intensive that the ability to plan investments -- in exploring, drilling, transporting and refining -- can be as important as the price of crude. "Please, Lord," an oil executive is likely to pray, "make the price $15 a barrel or make it $30, but let us know beforehand and keep it there a while."

War is the ultimate instability. Nobody knows, for example, how much physical damage Saddam might do to his own or his neighbors' oil fields. Will he blow them up? Can he make them toxic or radioactive as well?

The mere anticipation of war has driven oil prices to over $36 a barrel, up from about $20 a year ago. And prices may spike during the war in a "fear premium" of $5 or $6 a barrel, which translates to a 10- to 15-cent price boost at the gasoline pump for American drivers -- and another boost for oil company profits that are already surging. Once the war is over, though, the only direction prices can go is down. Any post-Saddam government will want to pump as much as possible to pay for reconstructing a war-torn country. The lifting of sanctions will make that easier, and gradually, as Iraq's infrastructure is rebuilt, its production will increase.

Here's where the argument that Big Oil wants war to "get" the oilfields falls apart: Until somebody repeals the law of supply and demand, more oil available on world markets can only mean lower prices. Lower prices may be good for Bush's reelection prospects, but they're bad for oil company profits.

The picture is especially precarious for Exxon Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and the rest of U.S. Big Oil. The U.S. lost a three-quarter share of Iraq's oil production in 1972, when Iraq nationalized its oil fields. The oil company with the most -- and best -- contracts to extract Iraqi oil is France's TotalFinaElf. Russia's LUKoil runs a close second. Chevron's bluntspoken CEO, Kenneth Derr, supported sanctions against Iraq in 1988 because, he said in a 1998 speech to San Francisco's tony Commonwealth Club, "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas I'd love Chevron to have access to." Sanctions offered a chance to pressure Saddam into making room for the American companies.

But sanctions are different from war. Some analysts say that removing Saddam will make it harder for American oil companies to gain the foothold Chevron covets, rather than easier. France and Russia, recalcitrant Bush allies, may be holding out for promises that the U.S. will require a post-Saddam government to honor the preferential contracts their oil companies enjoy -- starting with commissioning French and Russian oilmen for billions of dollars of restoration work. Ironically, as a political price for winning French and Russian support for war in the U.N. Security Council, American oil companies could be frozen out of postwar Iraq.

"There's absolutely no guarantee that U.S. Big Oil will participate" in post-Saddam Iraq, says Kyle Cooper, an oil-industry analyst at the brokerage Salomon Smith Barney in Houston.

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