War for Oil

I almost choked watching the news last night when I heard Jeanette Fitzsimons quite seriously announce to her annual conference (well bbq anyway) that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were both about cheap oil.

Taking each war in turn, I must say I never knew Afghanistan was a source of huge amounts of oil, but hey lets go for slogans and ignore September 11. The US should have just left the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan and the people there under a dictatorship. The Greens remain the only Party with an MP who supported the USSR invasion of Afghanistan yet oppossed the US-led liberation.

As for Iraq, well there is a very legitimate debate about whether the war was a good idea, but hello claiming it was about cheap oil is just nuts. Even if the US stole their entire oil supply, it would be the most expensive oil in the history of mankind. The war in Iraq is costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

It really despairs me when a so called serious party can not come up with anything better than idiotic slogans.

UPDATE: Rodney has also blogged on this. It seems Jeanette said peak oil not cheap oil. She claims peak oil is also the reason for the entire war on terrorism!!!