I think I can safely throw "The Conservative Soul" into the dumpster now.

After years of beating his readership over the head with the evils of "Christianism", Andrew Sullivan has finally started warming up to the "Big Oil" hypothesis for the Iraq War. He quotes from Jim Holt, who wrote in the "London Review of Books" that:

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

So "Christianists" weren't the real bad guys after all! The "Christianists", the Neocons, the Israel lobby (or whoever) were just as bought-off or deluded as everyone else: they engaged in the same old Big Government power capitalism that the United States has been engaged in since the days of John Adams and thought that they wouldn't be left holding the bag when the fiasco occured.

To cover his rear end on this massive blunder, Sullivan's article has a humerous point at the end:

Was this a plot from the beginning? I doubt it. But it is an obvious game-plan now.

He thinks that Big Oil executives -- i.e. the people who spend millions of dollars a year solely on keeping track of where the world's oil is and exactly how much it is worth -- just woke up yesterday morning and realized that they had a 3000% profit on a $1 trillion government investment in Iraq! What a lucky coincidence!