At the time of the invasion of Iraq, the reasons given for it seemed unconvincing; they are even less convincing now. Even the Bush administration can't have believed that the pathetic remains of Saddam Hussein's regime posed a serious threat to the United States, or that the secular Ba'athists were somehow hooked up with the religious fanatics of al Qaeda.

The Iraq war may also have been about preventing investment in alternative fuels.

Clearly, one motivation was the missionary zeal of the neoconservatives who dominate the US administration and seek to impose American-style ideals whether the world wants them or not. Another is that, as long as Saddam remained a threat to Israel and the rest of the region, we had to keep large numbers of troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — an irritant that may have been the motive for the 9/11 attacks. And of course, we have deposed a real monster who committed unspeakable crimes against his own people.

For decades, it has been the explicit policy of OPEC to keep the price of oil within certain limits: not too low, of course, to preserve revenue; but also not too high, because that would encourage investment in alternative fuels. The implicit threat is this: if you put money into developing an alternative to oil, we will open the spigot, flood the market with cheap oil and wipe out your investment. In other words, the war with Iraq may also have been about preventing investment in alternative fuels.

OPEC's policy is not based on hard-headed reality, but on naive belief in a foolish theory. Our society is firmly rooted in the myth of an endless supply of cheap oil. The theory is that when the oil does start to run out its price will go up, and a cheaper substitute will appear, magically. We may have gone to war to prevent that from happening, but it won't happen because it can't. There is no substitute for the cheap oil that runs our civilization.