"War on People Who Won't Sell the USA Oil Cheaply"? For some reason, variations of this idea -- I'll call it the Oil Conspiracy -- apparently have infinite traction with leftish types, much like the gold standard has with a certain kind of libertarian. It's just as completely, ludicrously, wrong, too, as econ 101 and ten minutes with Google can disprove it.

First the econ. Oil is nearly a perfect commodity; it's almost perfectly fungible. Russian and Mexican and Saudi oil are all pretty much perfect substitutes for one another. (A refinery engineer might quibble, but it really would just be quibbling.) You can get a pretty good model for how oil markets work by imagining all of the world's oil producers pouring their oil into a giant tank, and then having an auctioneer auction off the oil. Then the oil is auctioned off, and each producer's take is equal to the share they poured in. The US can't get favorable terms from any one nation, because effectively the oil comes from one big pot. The best it can do is to convince/bully producer nations into increasing production, which lowers prices across the board.

Has the US been doing that? Here's where Google comes in handy. First, it's been threatening war. That increases uncertainty about future supplies, which drives up prices. Okay, strike #1. Second, it's been the foremost supporter of restrictions on Iraqi oil sales, which would reduce the total supply and increase prices. Strike #2. Third, it's opposed building a oil pipeline from the Caspian through the short cheap route via Iran, favoring the longer, more expensive route running through Georgia. Strike #3.

The Oil Conspiracy is a theory that doesn't merely lack evidence, it's actively contradicted by the evidence. Whatever the US govt's strategic aims are, we can be sure that they are not about oil at the cheapest possible price.