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1. Iraq has oil - a lot of oil.
Iraq: Oil and Economy
Iraq's Oil Reserves: Untapped Potential While its proven oil reserves of 112 billion barrels ranks Iraq second in the work behind Saudi Arabia, EIA estimates that up to 90-percent of the county remains unexplored due to years of wars and sanctions. Unexplored regions of Iraq could yield an additional 100 billion barrels. Iraq's oil production costs are among the lowest in the world. However, only about 2,000 wells have been drilled in Iraq, compared to about 1 million wells in Texas alone.
That's only a few years. But consider where gas prices were a few years ago. That's a good first approximation of the difference that would have been possible without sanctions and two insane wars. There are all kinds of maybes hanging off that - e.g. an Iraq/Iran war could have pushed prices up even further, without US involvement. But assuming relatively stability, I'd guess that putting Iraqi oil on the market at full extraction levels would slash the price by at least a third.
So, the war has clearly been significant in terms of its requirements for the money press.
Either way, I doubt the Saudis are desperately unhappy about current price levels. But they were clearly unhappy about sharing power with an independent like Saddam.
I think an all-out invasion of Iran was always going to be less likely than an attack on Iraq, so I'm not convinced that Iran was ever a realistic alternative.
But I think it's worrying that people are arguing as if these wars were inevitable. Perhaps they were eventually, and acceptance of a Gore win in 2000 would only have postponed them. But the alternative was - and is - a crash Green development program, which wouldn't just lower gas prices but make them much less relevant to everyone. Gore might or might not have achieved that in a term. But we'd certainly be much closer to it than we are now.
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