With the oil price heading upwards and President George W. Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.

The importance of oil to American foreign policy is both obvious and curiously difficult to acknowledge in public. In the run-up to the Iraq war it was left to the left to make the argument that this was a “war for oil”. Establishment people – those in the know – rolled their eyes at this “conspiracy theory”.

Yet in recent months, both Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator John McCain have come close to saying that Iraq was indeed about oil. In his memoirs Mr Greenspan said he regretted that it was “politically inconvenient” to acknowledge that “the Iraq war is largely about oil”.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

It is difficult not to feel sorry for Barack Obama. The whole Jeremiah Wright thing is a complete nightmare. I doubt that Obama’s late-in-the-day repudiation of his spiritual mentor of 20 years is going to do the trick. Wright will be an issue for the rest of the campaign.

And so he should be. Obama has responded to Hillary Clinton’s assertion that she is the candidate of “experience”, by talking about his superior judgement. But what does it say about his judgement that he chose Reverend Wright as his pastor?

I don’t believe that Obama ever gave credence to Wright’s nuttier theories - such as his flirtation with the idea that AIDS might have been created by the US government as a genocidal weapon against blacks. I doubt that Obama agrees with Wright’s opinion that Louis Farrakhan is one of the great figures of 20th century history.

No, I think the “judgement” that Obama made was much more colder and more rational than that. One of his advisers once suggested to me that when Obama was looking to build a career in Chicago politics, it made sense for him to associate himself with the Rev. Wright. Someone with Obama’s middle-class and elite credentials might otherwise have struggled to build a political base in black Chicago.

That is the most plausible explanation I’ve heard for Obama’s long dalliance with Jeremiah Wright. It is understandable enough. But it is a rather calculating act for a man who claims to represent a new sort of politics. And the calculation looks rather less shrewd, now that he has made the transition to national politics

What is the cure for anti-Americanism in Europe? I have always thought that there is a one-word answer to that question - China.

And so it has come to pass. The FT-Harris poll released this week shows that a narrow majority of Europeans now regard China as the biggest threat to global stability - ahead of the United States. Of course, these kind of polls always reflect recent events. So the news out of Tibet - and, to a lesser extent, Darfur - will have hurt China’s image. Meanwhile the decline in coverage of the Iraq war - and the fact that the Bush administration is winding down - will help the US. (more…)

Various people have been in touch with me - by e-mail and on the blog - to ask what I thought of Obama’s speech on race and the Wright controversy? Wasn’t it a great speech, and doesn’t it prove that I was wrong to dismiss Obama as a master of empty rhetoric?

Difficult. Yes, it was a great speech. And perhaps I should just leave it at that. Any attempt at further explanation threatens to leave me sounding like one of those politicians, saying - “I do not for a moment withdraw any of my previous statements on this matter. However, in the light of recent events, I would like to issue some further remarks, expanding upon my previous statements and adding some important context.”

Well, I do not for a moment…etc, etc. But Obama’s race speech was completely different from his standard stump/victory speech - because of the context in which it was delivered. In his regular campaign appearances, Obama’s goal is simply to pump up the crowd with vague and vacuous applause lines. He is a master at producing euphoria. At one campaign stop, he was even cheered to the rafters simply for blowing his nose. (more…)

If the furore over the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran hadn’t intervened, the US delegation to the IISS security conference in Bahrain last weekend would have spent the time boasting about progress in Iraq. In 2006, the Americans sent a relatively low-level delegation to Bahrain. This time they were out in force. The delegation was led by Robert Gates, the defence secretary and included William Fallon, the admiral in charge of Centcom - which runs the US military presence in the Middle East. Also at the conference was Colonel HR McMaster - the American officer who pioneered the "clear and hold" tactics that became the model for the US "surge" in Iraq.

As it was, Gates did spend a fair amount of time talking about the progress that had been made in Iraq. But he was cautious about making sweeping claims that things have taken a decisive turn for the better. Everybody remembers the hubris of "mission accomplished". And the Americans are well aware of the fragility of security gains, without real political progress to back it up.

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Thanks to everyone who took part in the impromptu Iraq discussion. I was pleased to see that the contributors span the ideological spectrum from "Bush is a war criminal" to "secure the oil and let the hopeless Iraqis slug it out" (I paraphrase obviously). Since much of the blogosphere seems to be chopped up into the ideological equivalent of gated communities, it’s good to see such a range of opinions.

As for myself, I think the discussion helped clarify my thinking a bit - although I don’t think I’ve yet found "the solution". Rather than comment on each and every posting, I thought it might be useful to react to groups of ideas that cropped up.

First - Belgium. I’m fond of the place myself, since I used to live there. And a couple of correspondents seem to regard it as a possible model for Iraq - as does Volker Perthes, whose article I linked to. I’m not convinced however. The temptations of federalism or even partition are obvious - and that may be where we end up eventually. But any attempt to force the situation might involve further mass movements of people and killings - which looked more like the partition of India and Pakistan than the creation of Belgium (which I seem to remember is the only revolution ever to have started in an opera house.) Also partition might invite outside intervention and therefore a wider war. Would Turkey tolerate an independent Kurdistan? How would the Saudis feel about an Iranian-linked Shiastan in the south?

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I have written a lot about Iraq in the FT. But readers of my column might have noticed that - while not slow to dish out criticism - I have usually dodged the big question: so what would you do?

There is a simple reason for this evasiveness. I don’t know really know what I would do. Like most people, I am better at defining the question than providing the answer. So once again, I would like to turn to the readers of this blog for ideas and suggestions.

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‘‘My fellow Americans, our troops in Iraq have performed heroically and have done everything that has been asked of them. Under my presidency I will seek to bring our brave men and women home. But there will be no precipitate withdrawal from Iraq. We will secure our vital national interests.

“Our nation faces awesome challenges in Iraq and in the struggle against global jihadism. But I take inspiration from the ‘greatest generation’, which won the second world war, and from the statesmen who led us to victory in the cold war – men like George C. Marshall and Harry Truman.

The remainder of this week’s column can be read here (FT.com subscribers only). Comments can be made below.

I thought President Bush did a good job in his television address on Iraq last night (view video, transcript). He must have done. For a couple of minutes, I was almost convinced.

As expected, Bush made the case that the “surge” has worked. His speech was full of encouraging little anecdotes. He set out the moral and strategic case for persevering in Iraq with conviction. And he tried to build some sort of bipartisan consensus, by holding out the hope that the troop withdrawals he announced are just the beginning.

But – in the end – it doesn’t convince for two main reasons.

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I am sitting in a hotel room in Washington. The television is on in the background, because I’m hoping to catch more Congressional testimony from General David Petraeus. But even the mainstream news channels seem to be losing interest. They keep cutting away to other stuff - commemoration services for 9/11, Osama’s new video. All the news channels carried Petraeus live yesterday, when he testified before the House Foreign Affairs committees. Today, he and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which should be even more interesting - since his inquisitors include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But Petraeus fatigue has set in already.

It’s been a while since I watched hours of Congresssional testimony at a stretch. Yesterday was interesting, partly because it reminded me of the massive self-importance of Congress - neither Petraeus or Crocker got to say anything for almost an hour, while the committee members droned away. Their attitude seemed to be - "I’m really glad you’ve come all the way from Iraq, because there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest."

Petraeus says that the surge is working, which infuriates the anti-war crowd. But the people at Moveon.org scored an own goal, even before the general appeared before Congress, by publishing a full-page ad in the New York Times calling him "General Betray Us". This was so over-the-top that it was a gift to the Republicans.

Mind you, sotto voce, even some senior Republicans are not totally convinced by the general.

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