One of the main stories on Sixty Minutes last week was a segment asking the question: "Is war with Iraq really about oil?" Most of the anti-war crowd has already made up its collective mind, but the argument is stupid for a lot of reasons:

1) Hussein would rather destroy his own oil fields before letting anyone else control them. I've suggested this as a likely scenario in the past, and now here's a news story strongly suggesting that this is exactly what he's planning, should we have to respond militarily.

2) Cost is the other big pin the balloon of such a stupid theory. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that it could cost up to $21 billion a month to fight a war with Iraq, and up to $272 billion for a three month war followed by a five year occupation. That's a lot of money. Iraq's estimated oil export revenues for 2002 are about $13 billion. That's for one year. Do that math, folks. It's cost prohibitive for us to enter an open-ended war at such a high expense, that would take years, and perhaps decades, to pay off with oil revenues, and that's if the U.S. government completely took over 100% of all oil operations and reaped 100% of the profit, instead of signing oil contracts with any foreign countries or even American companies. Think about. It doesn't make any damned sense. We could buy a heck of a lot of oil for the $9 billion a month a war would cost.

People like to be able to boil down issues to tag-lines, so a common one we get, even though it's dumber than dirt, is: It's all about oil!

Iraqi troops torched Kuwaiti oil field during the Gulf War, and it's a strong likelihood their own fields could be targets. That, and the idea that it's for oil profits just doesn't make sense, since it would take more money to capture the oil fields than they'd be able to earn back for the U.S. Government for many, many years.

Get some decent arguments, people, or nobody's gonna take you seriously.