CommentaryI find it kind of odd that he calls Central Asia a frontier for the "real war for oil". Which begs the question: Does that make Iraq a phony war for oil? The "arrangements" for Iraqi (or for that matter Iranian) oil that the blogger talks about show no solidification as far as I can tell. It may or may not quite shake out as expected according to A Story About Oil You NEED To Hear.
There was always something odd about calling OIF a "war for oil". Oil from the Middle East has been shipped through established marketing channels for decades. OIF is unlikely to alter those arrangements. Perhaps the real war for oil, in the sense of a struggle for arrangements that do not yet exist is over the reserves in Central Asia. In that struggle Russia has the key advantage of geography. It lies right across the Eurasian landmass and the petroleum roads of the 21st century must pass within or close to her borders. The future oil fields are redoubts of the Islamic fundamentalism and the traditional arena of the Great Game power rivalry between Russia, China and the leading maritime power, once Britain, now the United States.
I predict that with films such as Syriana and The Deal providing convenient routes for oil geo-politics to enter pop culture, we will see the inevitable backlash against so-called Hollywood phoniness. Somebody will eventually assert that the "phony" Iraq/oil connection came about whole cloth from the minds of leftist screenwriters.
But then again, you can't make this stuff up. Take a look at this interesting graphic from a post entitled Syriana for the Quantitatively Oriented: The Transportation Oil Gap .
You can argue the plot-line but the numbers speak for themselves. Somebody has to go to war for the SUV army.