No Blood For Oil

For all those who take seriously the fatuous rantings of Michael Moore and his ilk, there's this from the latest issue of National Review (1/25/10).

"Of all the libels that were directed against Bush in relation to the Iraq War — and they were legion — the most offensive, and the least intelligent, was the calumny that he had engineered the war to enrich buddies in the U.S. oil business. Never mind the risible misreading of Bush and his agenda implicit in that belief; the simple economic fact is that if Bush had wanted to hand a juicy slice of Iraqi oil profits to American firms, he could have done so, at practically no cost, in exchange for lifting economic sanctions against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Iraq, as it happens, has lately completed a second round of bids on oil-development projects in the country, and U.S. companies are conspicuous by their absence from the list of winners. Sonangol, the state-run firm in Angola, was awarded a big contract, as were Royal Dutch Shell, the Russian giant Lukoil, and Norway’s Statoil. China’s CNPC won contracts in the first round, along with British Petroleum. Exxon Mobil and Occidental secured some relatively modest development business in the latest auction, but no American firm was given a contract. The Left’s slogan “No Blood for Oil” turned out to be accurate — as prediction."