Naw, I'm not saying we're in Iraq directly for the oil - though since we went to the effort and expense of invading the place, I think we oughta just take their oil while we're there. Hell, we're in Afghanistan too and there's no oil there.

I'm saying that if there were no oil in the whole Middle East, the region wouldn't be important to us and the people wouldn't be a danger to us either.

If that were the case, we could safely ignore the Middle East, like so many other poverty-stricken hellholes full of crazed natives around the world.

It's our bad luck that so much oil lies in Muslim lands, because the Muslims are stuck in the seventh century and they're about the least democratic people on earth. But those oil deposits make the region vital to us, so we've gotta deal with those screwballs somehow.

The oil also brings wealth to that region, so it provides funding for the Muslim fanatics. Without oil they'd be so poor they'd be down to hacking on each other with swords like they always did - and we could just leave them alone.