Replies

"Last time I looked, there weren't any African nationals flying planes into buildings (like the terrorists) or rolling their tanks into other nations to take them over for THEIR oil (like Saddam in 1990)."

Very true, but I think the U.S. Gov't handling of the region would be much different if it weren't for the oil. (Like we wouldn't be kissing the Saudi's behinds right now.)

However, if all we really wanted was oil, we could kiss every Arab despots backside until they did business with us. What they did to their own citizens was their problem.

It is not the oil, and yet it is the oil.
We are dealing with the totality of the oil, the global industrial oil economy, the entire history thereof, and the results of the Cold War cycles of conflict by proxy in an area made important only by the presense of oil.
Think about it: What if we had somehow bypassed the technological and economic need for oil some 100 years ago, before it had been discovered in significant quantity in what was then a poor, barren, sparsely populated, and utterly insignificant armpit of the world? Or, what if there had simply been no oil fields laid down in the carboniferous period in what would become the Middle East?
Think about it.
Uncounted trillions of dollars would not have been injected into those lands. Advanced medicine and technology would not have become available to them. National boundaries would not have been imposed by competing european empires. OPEC would never have happened. The US and USSR would not have sparred over the territory, funding insurgency groups to destabilize things, funding other thugs to be our dogs in the region. The populations would not have exploded. The people would have remained unsophisticated wanderers and herders. Nomads do not have global imperial ambitions.
If not for oil, the Middle East would never have become important enough for us to become in any way involved with it. 9/11 would not have happened. The entire Middle East would be irrelevant today.
I am not expressing this notion as clearly as I would like. Forgive me - long day. But I trust you have grasped the gist: If not for oil, nobody would give a damn about the Middle East.