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Originally Posted by Tdog
How do you go to war knowing that you are going to get paid in oil?
If we invade China do we know ahead of time that we will get paid in Fortune Cookies?
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"What happened to Iraq oil, Mr. President? You said Iraqi oil would pay for the war. Ain't seen no money. Ain't seen no oil," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland.
...by making Saddam's WMD the rationale for invading Iraq and then coming up empty handed after a long search it's tough to sell an open-ended occupation to a public that was told Iraqi oil would pay for everything.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: ?I don't believe that the United States has the responsibility for reconstruction, in a sense?[Reconstruction] funds can come from those various sources I mentioned: frozen assets, oil revenues and a variety of other things, including the Oil for Food, which has a very substantial number of billions of dollars in it. [Source: Senate Appropriations Hearing, 3/27/03]
Before the war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for reconstruction and faced criticism from anti-war activists of a "war for oil." After the oil revenue failed to materialize, Bush, a former Texas oilman himself, rarely mentioned Iraqi oil.