In the wake of a full-scale assault on Iran by the United States and Israel, and the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, oil-based theories of imperialism are understandably getting attention. As we approach the twenty-three-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, this perilous moment gives us an opportunity to revisit arguments that the Iraq War was, in the words of David Harvey in The New Imperialism — a tract written in reaction to Iraq itself — “All About Oil.”

On the surface, the case that the 2003 Iraq invasion was motivated by oil seems indisputable. First, after the chaos of civil strife generated by the war, the invasion ultimately led to a surge in Iraq’s oil production. Iraq is now, in fact, the sixth-largest producer of oil in the world.

Second, it was obvious to everyone at the time that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had very close connections to the oil industry. Indeed, Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton, said in 1999 that Middle Eastern oil is “where the prize ultimately lies.” And when deputy secretary of defense and arch-neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz was asked point-blank why the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq over say North Korea, he responded candidly, “The most important difference between North Korea . . . is [that Iraq] . . . swims on a sea of oil.” The Federal Reserve chairman at the time, Alan Greenspan, also later admitted, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”