It took several years after the US invaded Iraq before top officials began admitting what was plainly obvious — it may not have been a war “for” oil, strictly speaking, but it was most definitely a war “about” oil. 

As so often happens, we only get the candid admissions when people write their memoirs. In the case of America’s last major assault in the Middle East, it was Alan Greenspan, the long-time chair of the US Federal Reserve, appointed by Ronald Reagan. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows,” he wrote in his 2007 book. “The Iraq war is largely about oil.” 

The world is caught again in the bloody tangle of war, fossil fuels and climate change. But as the world’s biggest petrostate bombs the number two in fossil gas reserves (number 3 in oil reserves), it is led by someone who has never felt constrained by inconveniences. “I still can’t believe we left Iraq without the oil,” now-US President Donald Trump fumed, years before his run for the presidency. “To the victor belong the spoils,” he said during the 2016 campaign. “I always said: take the oil.” 

There are so many layers that we can only begin to tease them apart. Oil and gas have been the fuel of the ayatollahs’ murderous theocracy. The regime took power after toppling an autocrat installed after oil interests fuelled a US coup against the elected leader who had nationalized the oil industry. Oil fuels the destroyers, bombers and fighter jets today. Paradoxically, the US’s current war on Iran is choking the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran’s counterattacks are threatening oil and gas installations around the Persian Gulf. 

The byproducts of burning all this oil and gas have made the warzone one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in........

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