Bush got himself caught in a monkey trap. The trap was Iraq. The banana was the country's proven oil reserves of 115 billion barrels, with who knows how many more on top of that. The Energy Information Administration in the US uses a number of 400 billion barrels. The oil was going to be the lever to transform US military pre-eminence into a new world empire. Russia, broken since the collapse of the Soviet Union would not be able to resist the theft of the Central Asian Republics. China and India would have to come begging for oil. These were the dreams the Project for a New American Century was made of. They reckoned without Bush's ability to stay the course. Like the Malaysian monkey, the President of the United States just would not let go.

Instead the US military is in the process of being broken, and it is Bush's US which is doing the begging, for finance to cover the cost of holding on to the banana, and for oil, to cover shortfalls caused domestically by incompetence and negligence, like BP's rusty pipeline in Alaska, and the failure to recover from damage caused by hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, and the insurgency in Nigeria, and Venezuela's decision to sell less to the US. No need to mention that the US is getting less oil from Iraq now than it was when the `Great Dictator' was in power.

Unless of course the whole thing was a big red herring, and the whole idea of invading Iraq was to strengthen Saudi Arabia's `swing' position in the world oil market, along with its lesser allies in the Gulf, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar and so on, while shoring up the Kingdom politically by removing some of those infidel troops. Saudi Arabia  benefited from the military shut-in of Iraqi oil, in 1990, and subsequently: http://www.chewinthefat.com/artman/publish/article_83.shtml . That's almost as ridiculous as imagining the whole business was intended to benefit Russia, isn't it?

Now Bush has got Iraq's oil. It turns out there's not much he can do with it, except hold on. He hasn't been able to privatize it. And, for a former oil man, he certainly has not been prepared to admit that physical possession of unusable resources is trumped any day by a ready supply available for ready delivery.  When, in July 2003, a mere four months after the invasion, with the oil infrastructure under insurgent attack, major international companies would not invest to support the coalition Provisional Authority's privatization scheme http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2003/0724snub.htm , it was also estimated that the cost to get the Iraqi oil fields back in shape, after being the target of US bombing in 2 wars, would be at least $40 billion. Three years ago that must have seemed like a lot of money to those who claimed the oil would pay for the war, now it has been dwarfed by the amounts poured into the commitment to hold on, and stay the course, http://wilsonalmanac.blogspot.com/2003/07/216-blogmanac-oil-groups-snub-us-on.html

US plans to seize Gulf oil fields were set in motion back in 1973 at the time of the OPEC embargo after the Yom Kippur War  . When Bush's father invaded Iraq on August 6th 1990 to "save our way of life" his Tomahawk missiles staked a claim against all comers to the country's oil. Clinton did his part. He worked to keep the United Nations sanctions in place playing on the ultimately totally discredited Weapons of Mass Destruction story, Iraq destroyed everything at the end of the first Bush's war, and kept the elder Bush's claim to the oil fields alive, while preventing anyone else from moving in, and many wanted to, Russia, China, France and more  . Clinton also thus helped organize a significant reduction in the available world oil supply. So Iraqi oil has in effect been held off the market for 16 years, helping to set a floor under the price, and supporting those, like the Saudis, who can produce for demand which is not covered by long term supply contracts.

Despite the loss of life and treasure, the destruction of a country, the descent into civil war, Bush has really accomplished no more than had been done previously with far less dramatic and costly means, whether measured in life or treasure. Except before it might have been possible to imagine conditions under which the Iraqi oil might become available again, now that is much more difficult to do. Brings back the question of the Saudis, I think, the more difficult it is to get Iraqi oil back on line, the stronger the Saudi swing position among the producers ought to be.

The present Maliki government was elected this past January, in elections organized according to the Constitution voted on in the Fall of the 2005. In December 2005, the IMF approved a loan for Iraq, one of the conditions on the loan being that the oil resources of the country be privatized before the end of 2006. With four months to go, one of the major sources of contention in the fighting that is taking around 100 lives every day is the question of what the proceeds from the oil resources will be for each of the factions involved.

The Maliki government has become almost as much use to Bush as the oil reserves seem to be. Its behavior does not indicate the quirkiness or eccentricity of the government members, but reflects the situation in which they find themselves. What will come after the Maliki government, if Maliki is killed, or if the government falls? It took three months of intensive arm-twisting from the U.S. embassy to get that government into place. Will there be another successor combination able to hold things together? Can Bush take over directly again with the forces deployed there now? Is that when there is no alternative to admitting that what is going on is civil war? Or are US troops being sent into harm's way while the Saudis and Iranians fight it out in Iraq?

It is not hard to imagine the hunters.gleefully contemplating the hapless creature insisting on holding tightly on to his banana before they move in. There's much more than a hapless creature stuck in this trap, however. And, given how much the Saudis and their friends have benefited from the arrangements so far, they will function as indicator perhaps of the way things are going.