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.

Does the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of CentCom mean that the “war party” is back in control of American policy to Iran?

I doubt it’s quite that simple. From what we know both the secretaries of state and defence - Rice and Gates - are opposed to an attack. But there is no doubt that fallon was a key member of the “peace party”.

I met him at the IISS conference in Bahrain late last year, just after the US had published the famous NIE report that appeared to debunk the idea that Iran is building nuclear weapons. Fallon was cock-a-hoop. He was keen to underline what a fundamental re-assessment this was and how “wrong”, in his eyes, previous intelligence reports had been.

It could be that Fallon is resigning for reasons other than Iran. He is said to be a difficult guy to work with. All the same, I would say that the odds of an attack on Iran before the end of the Bush administration, have just gone up.