No blood for oil, revisited: The strategic role of oil in the 2003 Iraq War

Abstract

‘It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil’, said US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in 2002, of the planned attack on Iraq. Politicians and conservative commentators in the United States and United Kingdom were insistent on this point, even while it felt obvious to many in their countries, and in Iraq itself, that oil objectives were central. This article will review what we now know about discussions of oil that took place during the war planning and execution, based on documents that have been released in the fifteen years since. It will examine the nature of the strategic objectives, how the US and UK governments planned to achieve them and how they decided to talk about them in public. Reflecting on this evidence will allow us to revisit the question: was oil a major reason for the war?