And The Civil War Wasn't About Slavery

Lots of discussion on the 'sphere this week about a comment in Alan Greenspan's upcoming memoirs that "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq War is largely about oil."

Needless to say, most of the liberal bloggers are writing something along the lines of, 'duh!' While most of the conservatives are writing something about how it's not at all about the oil, it was about preserving stability in the region, or how Saddam was a threat to the region, something like that.

Which is almost certainly true. He was a threat to the stability of the region.

But why do we care about the stability of the Middle East, and not so much about the stability of sub-Saharan Africa? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, 'the region' known as the Middle East is full of oil.