Big Oil's 'secret' out of Iraq's closet

By Pepe Escobar

NEW YORK - It is not about the "war on terror". It is not about weapons of mass destruction. It is not about "freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people", or to the "Afghan people". It is not about "Islamofascism". It is not about a Pentagon-coined "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia. New evidence shows once again both George W Bush administration wars - in Afghanistan and Iraq - above all are about oil and gas.

Those were the days - up to a few days ago, actually - when the fateful words "war" and "oil" would never have been aligned in the same sentence anywhere in US corporate media; the days when former defense secretary and Pentagon supremo Donald Rumsfeld insisted Iraq had "literally nothing to do with oil".