While the widely heard objection that US hostility to the Saddam Hussein regime is actually "all about oil" rhetorically simplifies a multi-faceted problem, it would be naive to deny that the security of world oil supplies is a relevant factor in the looming conflict.

It is impossible to exclude the possibility that Saddam Hussein, obsessed with Saladin-style delusions of historical grandeur, might use a nuclear capacity for purposes of apocalyptic self-promotion - an attack on Israel being the most prominent candidate. After all, he is on record for declaring that the purpose of his WMD ambitions is to deal with the "Jews and Persians."

A more immediately plausible and disturbing scenario, however, is that nuclear capability would be used "defensively" to secure an Iraqi accession of Gulf oil supplies against restitution. After all, a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein would have been relatively secure in his possession of Kuwait in 1991, with little to inhibit him from adding Saudi Arabia to his conquests.

From the US perspective, a nuclear Iraq would have the potential to dominate the world's oil supplies - a prospect that no responsible US administration could tolerate.

Those who rally to the ubiquitous slogan, "No blood for oil," despite its almost incredible inanity, are evidently more distressed by visions of US oil companies "looting" the Gulf than by the role of oil in funding regional tyranny, militarism and terror.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that people bleed for oil every day. Affordable oil is the basic nutrient of the world economy, with every price-hike throwing millions of the earth's poorest inhabitants into destitution, hopelessness, or worse. It is no coincidence that Africa's development process collapsed along with the consolidation of OPEC's stranglehold on world oil supplies.

In almost every case where abundant oil deposits have been found, they have been exploited as an alternative to hard work and the building-up of human capital through education and enterprise, fostering cultural degeneration and the substitution of corrupt oligarchies for representative government. Countries that have managed to resist this oil legacy, such as Mexico and Russia, have still had to struggle vigorously against the same problems of black-gold sleaze, graft and despotic temptation to which so many others have succumbed.

Almost everybody would benefit from an oil economy in which oil functioned as a normal commodity, cheaply and reliably available. The people in oil-producing countries would gain most of all, because for them politicized oil is social poison, and it wasn't the current Bush administration that made it so.

While oil fuels Jihad and terror, conflict is inevitable. As one US weblogger demands: No oil for blood.

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