[31] News from Absurdistan - The Raptorial Fallacy of Going to War for Oil

While a favourite description of the "deadly enemies" of the US, being irrational and at the same time not only holding in their hands but actually using copiously weapons of mass destruction against innocent peoples is precisely what the US administration has been doing for years on end, with little prospect that the will of the [American] people to cease waging these wars will be represented and properly acted upon by the institutions of American democracy.

For the doubtful, invading a country with 130 000 soldiers and killing the occupied at a rate of 10 000 per month is using weapons of mass destruction - even if we are not talking about nuclear devices but a captive group called American soldiers whose duty to their country is no longer defined by the Constitution but by a blood-thirsty dictator with an endless record of spurious ad-hoc rationals to continue the slaughter.

And to those, who question the figure, referring to methodologically less convincing studies that place the number at 2 000 to 3 000, I say: we are still talking about mass destruction.

And let me remind the accountants of death, it is not the number of casualties that gives us insight into the fundamental issue of whether a war is just or not.

Analysing the raptorial fallacy of going to war for oil, David. R. Henderson writes in his executive summary:

Many people fear that a hostile foreign oil producer will be able to damage Americans and, for that reason, think that the U.S. government should ensure U.S. access to oil. But a foreign government cannot cause Americans to line up for gasoline.

Only price controls imposed by U.S. governments can do that, which is what they did in the 1970s.

A hostile foreign oil producer cannot inflict more than a small amount of harm on Americans by refusing to sell oil to Americans, unless this oil producer is willing to cut its own output. If a hostile foreign oil producer maintains output but cuts exports to the United States, it initiates a game of musical chairs in which the number of chairs equals the number of players. Different buyers will be linked with different sellers than before the hostile producer reduced its oil exports to the United States, but the cost to Americans of switching suppliers would be negligible. The only way a foreign oil producer can harm Americans is by cutting output, but that producer will then harm itself and also harm all other oil users, not just U.S. consumers. This harm is likely to be well under 0.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product(GDP). Ironically, war for oil could well drive the price of oil higher, not lower, thus costing Americans twice—as taxpayers and as oil users.