I keep seeing this over and over: the assertion that the war in Iraq was all about oil. Let's get this straight right now.

Iraq is a minor player with miniscule oil reserves. In fact, all of OPEC put together does not add up to even half of the world's total oil reserves. The fact is that the province of Alberta in Canada has 1.6 trillion barrels of oil in its tar sands - out of a worldwide total reserve of 2.6 trillion barrels - in other words, more than half of the world's oil is within 600 miles of the US border. In addition, Alberta has conventional oil deposits of 62 billion barrels, about half of Saudi Arabia's total reserves. That is just Alberta, the neighbouring provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan also have lots of oil, and there has long been offshore drilling on the East coast as well in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Oh yeah, Alberta also supplies the USA with half of its natural gas.

So, if the US was only interested in oil, they wouldn't be going halfway around the world to get it. They could roll the tanks across the Montana border and simply take all of Alberta's oil in about a day. We couldn't stop them. (Not that Albertans would put up much resistance to that, as we are more American than Canadian. Alberta is so redneck it makes Texas look like France.) And yet, they do not.

Does this make sense to anyone? An administration supposedly so oil-hungry that they will go halfway around the world to forcibly take it... but not taking over half the world's oil supply by taking over Alberta? Get it folks? It ain't about oil at all.