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from an article by the one you love to hate, Mr. Robert Fisk:

The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning of this month that
by 2025, US oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total US
domestic demand. (It was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner of
the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week, "US oil deposits are
increasingly depleted, and many other non-Opec fields are beginning to run
dry. The bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf region."
No wonder the whole Bush energy policy is based on the increasing
consumption of oil. Some 70 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves
are in the Middle East. And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?

Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve to oil production -
the number of years that reserves of oil will last at current production
rates - compiled by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where
more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil has already been produced,
the ratio is just 10 years, as it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In
Iran, it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates 75:1.
In Kuwait, it's 116:1. But in Iraq, it's 526:1. And this forthcoming war
isn't about oil?

Even if Donald Rumsfeld's hearty handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983 -
just after the Great Father Figure had started using gas against his
opponents - didn't show how little the present master of the Pentagon
cares about human rights or crimes against humanity, along comes Joost
Hilterman's analysis of what was really going on in the Pentagon back in
the late 1980s.

Hilterman, who is preparing a devastating book on the US and Iraq, has dug
through piles of declassified US government documents - only to discover
that after Saddam gassed 6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at Halabja (that's well over
twice the total of the World Trade Centre dead of 11 September 2001) the
Pentagon set out to defend Saddam by partially blaming Iran for the
atrocity.

A newly declassified State Department document proves that the idea was
dreamed up by the Pentagon - who had all along backed Saddam - and states
that US diplomats received instructions to push the line of Iran's
culpability, but not to discuss details. No details, of course, because
the story was a lie. This, remember, followed five years after US National
Security Decision Directive 114 - concluded in 1983, the same year as
Rumsfeld's friendly visit to Baghdad - gave formal sanction to billions of
dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Baghdad. And this
forthcoming war is about human rights?

Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick
Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men - most involved in the oil
business - created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group
demanding "regime change" in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton,
they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt
Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that "we should
establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be
prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests [sic] in the
Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power".

The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
now Rumsfeld's Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary of state
for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's under-secretary at
the State Department - who called last year for America to take up its
"blood debt" with the Lebanese Hizbollah. They also included Richard
Perle, a former assistant secretary of defence, currently chairman of the
defence science board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation
oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan - where
Unocal tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across
Afghan territory - and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed a
special Bush official for - you guessed it - Iraq.

The signatories also included our old friend Elliott Abrams, one of the
most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US officials, who was convicted for his
part in the Iran-Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared Israeli prime
minister Ariel Sharon - held "personally responsible" by an Israeli
commission for the slaughter of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the 1982
Sabra and Chatila massacre - to (wait for it) Winston Churchill. So this
forthcoming war - the whole shooting match, along with that concern for
"vital interests" (ie oil) in the Gulf - was concocted five years ago, by
men like Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their manicured
fingertips.

In fact, I'm getting heartily sick of hearing the Second World War being
dug up yet again to justify another killing field. It's not long ago that
Bush was happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing up to the appeasement
of the no-war-in Iraq brigade. In fact, Bush's whole strategy with the
odious and Stalinist-style Korea regime - the "excellent" talks which US
diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader's Korea which very
definitely does have weapons of mass destruction - reeks of the worst kind
of Chamberlain-like appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve each
other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly no Churchill. But now
we are told that the UN inspectors have found what might be the vital
evidence to go to war: 11 empty chemical warheads that just may be 20
years old.

The world went to war 88 years ago because an archduke was assassinated in
Sarajevo. The world went to war 63 years ago because a Nazi dictator
invaded Poland. But for 11 empty warheads?