For a little over a year I've been occasionally conducting an informal survey. The methodology is not scientific and wouldn't stand up long against criticism, yet the results seem clear: most people believe that we're in Iraq for the oil and we're not going to leave.
The survey technique is simple: when it seems appropriate during a conversation, I mention that I'm doing an informal survey on the Iraq war. So far, this always gets the required attention. Then I ask the person to tell me why she or he thinks we're in Iraq. Out of about thirty people no one has refused to participate.
About half the people have said straight up that we're in Iraq for the oil. The other half first gave an answer that was not oil-usually it was a variation of Bush is evil or a variation of the "father thing." To those people I then say, "Sure, that's a reason, but why are we really in Iraq?" Except for two people, the second answer given has been that we're there for the oil. Finally, I ask everyone if we're ever going to leave. No one has said we're going to leave any time soon.
Granted that most of the people in this obviously unscientific sample have a progressive bias so the "we're there for the oil" answer is not unexpected, especially when I ask for another answer if oil is not the first one. Yet, the half dozen or so conservative types in the sample all saw it the same way as the liberals.
If my conclusion that almost everybody believes [in their heart] we're in Iraq for the oil and we're not leaving is correct, what does it really mean? Since this view is not articulated very loud and often in public discourse, it means to me that the proverbial elephant is indeed in the room in the room and nobody wants to admit it's there or talk about it. That's understandable. Not many people want to think or talk about trading blood for oil. We tend to avoid unpleasant truths.
We pretend that the slaughter house with its floors covered with blood, guts, hair, and shit doesn't exist, because if we didn't pretend, most of us couldn't eat the meat we crave. Similarly, we pretend that the oil we use to fuel our economy is unrelated to our demonstrated willingness to spend blood and kill to insure its supply. (I'll suggest here that the reason the war on Iraq has not yet increased our supply of oil so far is more a matter of incompetence than intent, i.e., we were willing to trade blood for oil but botched the deal.)
When Secretary of State James Baker said the [first] Gulf War was about jobs and the free flow of oil at market prices, his explanation didn't set well with the American public, so other less true explanations were offered up. The bayoneting of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals was one of my favorites. It demonstrated how much we preferred disinformation to truth and how willing our government was to dish up the disinformation we wanted. Not much has changed with the government. A decade and a half later the lies continue and morph. It's we're fighting "them" there, so we don't have to fight them here, and so on. But there is, however, a difference now: many of us-maybe even most of us-no longer can lie as well to ourselves as we could before. You can see it in the poll numbers and feel it in the air. This is good.