Yes it is about oil, and yes it matters.

• Author: Alexander, Robert F.
• Position: From Readers - Letter to the Editor

I am writing in response to the following sequence of comments in World Watch:

"It's Not About Oil!" (Note From a Worldwatcher, May/June '03); "It's Not About Oil, Really!" (Letter from Walter Youngquist, July/August '03); and "UN, Not U.S., Controls Iraq's Oil Revenue" (Letter from Youngquist, November/December '03).

Damn it, it is about oil and, yes, this topic continues to be appropriate for World Watch.

First, Daniel Yergin (cited by Walter Youngquist as agreeing with his argument that the war in Iraq is not about oil) may have an 11-year-old Pulitzer under his belt, but he is an embedded MSNBC shill who writes from the bosom of big oil, still claiming--all evidence to the contrary--that we are regularly killing Iraqi civilians and American soldiers solely in search of weapons of mass destruction. I would say it requires several leaps of logic to conclude that the Iraq crisis is not about oil.

For 600 years from the end of the Crusades until World War I, the Mideast enjoyed peace while the West (Europe and the New World) completely savaged itself on multiple occasions. It was not until tanks replaced...