Reply #4: Bush was a failed oilman so it's no wonder they got Iraqi oil wrong too [View All]

Bush couldn't stand for Saddam to have control of that much oil.

Good points about failure of Iraq oil to pay for the expenses of reconstruction:

"The president's men saw what they wished to see - the 115 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the desert. They were blind to what was really there: an oil industry decimated by more than a decade of economic sanctions, with technological decay and even geological deterioration of the fields already gnawing at it.

The rash predictions about Iraqi oil paying for the American conquest of Iraq were always suspect, part of the marketing campaign that sold the war. "The statement in and of itself always struck me as part of the spin that this was going to be a clean, simple, fairly cost-free operation," a veteran adviser to Western governments in Baghdad told me in an interview.

Just as UN weapons inspectors, once allowed back into Iraq, correctly surmised that there were no weapons of mass destruction, so, too, did oil industry inspectors for the United Nations accurately assess the dire condition of Iraq's oil industry. In 1998 a UN report found it in a lamentable state. The conclusion was confirmed in 2000 and again in 2001. "Basically being held together with chewing gum," is how the Western expert described it. "At the time this was dismissed by the United States as just another example of how the UN had been taken in by the Iraqis."

The U.S. Energy Information Administration concedes the point. The report for the United Nations "now appears to have been largely accurate," the agency says in its latest analysis of Iraq's oil situation."