President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil-company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Mr. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn’t wait. It didn’t matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, American troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target  the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry  not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry  probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

Image Bob Herbert

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its contracts with big oil.