I don’t disagree with most of what you wrote. I think I mentioned how important I felt oil was to not only our economy by the world at large.

I don’t know why you are even mentioning 9/11. I sure didn’t. However, if you don’t think Saddam was capable of attempting 9/11 style attack you are naive. Saddam was a megalomaniac and not bright enough to know when to say enough is enough.

Now I am not saying that angle should have been played up as the major reason for renewing active conflict with the Iraqis, there were enough good reasons imo even without WMDs, but it certainly was a possibility, more so against his neighbors though than us.

Also, while oil has spiked and dropped, I am not sure how much of that movement was supply/demand driven. Imo much of the spike was a speculative bubble, like what we saw happen in real estate but for mostly other reasons.

Yes, there were some supply/demand issues like OPEC controlling supply, ethanol refinery issues and growing economies but the dramatic 2008 increase from 70/barrel to 145/barrel and back down below 70/barrel were caused mostly by speculation (or fear of supply issues not real supply issues).

So it was the added risk premium to the crude oil price which largely was responsible for the extreme price spike. When that eased prices dropped almost 4 times as fast as they rose and they rose pretty fast.

Imo concerns about supply is not the same as a lack of supply or an increase in real demand.

Yet, I do agree oil is a key component to all economies and if Saddam wasn’t sitting on a vast amount of oil and threatening our allies we probably wouldn’t have been involved. I don’t have a problem with that though but I know some folks do.