With the oil price heading upwards and President George Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.

The importance of oil to American foreign policy is both obvious and curiously difficult to acknowledge in public. In the run-up to the Iraq war it was left to the left to make the argument that this was a “war for oil”. Establishment people – those in the know – rolled their eyes at this “conspiracy theory”.


Yet in recent months, both Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator John McCain have come close to saying that Iraq was indeed about oil. In his memoirs Mr Greenspan said he regretted that it was “politically inconvenient” to acknowledge that “the Iraq war is largely about oil”.

Earlier this month Mr McCain, who will carry the Republican banner in this year’s presidential election, promised an energy policy “that will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East” and so “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East”.

Both Mr Greenspan and Mr McCain subsequently issued “clarifications”. Mr McCain now says that the conflict that he was thinking about was the first Gulf war of 1991. As for the Iraq war of 2003, that was about... whatever he said it was about at the time: weapons of mass destruction, probably.