'1. US intervention in the First Gulf War *did* have something to do with oil, in the sense that Bush Sr. would have been much less likely to intervene if Kuwait had not been a major oil producer. Adding Iraq's oil to Kuwait's oil would put a lot of oil - and all the power (e.g., weapons) that go with it - in the hands of Saddam Hussein. '
But if you look at the discussions that were being had (say in Norman Schwarzkopf's memoirs, it Doesn't Take a Hero) it was not about oil, but the need to identify a military opponent to justify military spending because the Cold War was coming to an end.
'The book documents how, in the lead up to the Gulf War itself, Schwarzkopf's professional militarism coincided with the American military establishment's needs of the moment. Schwarzkopf joined Central Command, which covers parts of the Middle East, in July 1988. By July 1989, running short of the enemies a general needs to justify his job, he was pointing the finger at Iraq:
'I was confident of the Middle East's strategic importance and, therefore, of Central Command's reason for existence. Nobody except a few stubborn hardliners believed that we'd go to war against the Soviets in the Middle East....So I asked myself, what was most likely? Another confrontation like the tanker war, one that had the United States intervening in a regional conflict that had gotten out of control and was threatening the flow of oil to the rest of the world. What was the worst case? Iraq as the aggressor....' (p286)
Schwarzkopf worked overtime to throw out the old 'Zagros Mountains plan' which assumed a Soviet invasion and replaced it with 'Internal Look'. The new plan assumed an Iraqi invasion to seize Saudi oil fields.
The telling thing here is that Schwarzkopf, in line with his own career outlook assumes that there must be an enemy, and then goes looking for one. The wish is father to the thought. What is generally true for generals happens to be particularly true for a militaristic society like the USA - first they needed an enemy, then they found one.
Looking back at this episode, it is not hard to see why perceptive commentators believed the Iraqi regime had been set up to invade Kuwait in August 1990. On the eve of the invasion April Glaspie, the US ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein that the USA had 'no opinion on the Iraq-Kuwaiti dispute' - at the same time that the US military command for the region was actually preparing for a war with Iraq. In late July 1990, Schwarzkopf staged a mock-up of 'Internal Look' just two weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As he says himself 'the movements of Iraq's real-world ground and air forces eerily paralleled the imaginary scenario in our game' (p292).'
Review of It Doesn't Take a Hero, Living Marxism, issue 51, January 1993