Critics read the Iraq war as driven by petroleum interests

Evidence

Also as we have seen, some nations viewed the war on terrorism as a pretext for taking control of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves and ending the dominance of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its monopoly on oil prices (Banerjee, 2002). Critics viewed the diplomatic haggling with France and Russia over the UN resolution on inspection of Saddam’s weapons arsenal and the threshold for waging war as partly driven by their established stake in the development of Iraq’s lucrative oil (Henley, Younge, & Walsh, 2003). The Polish government also supported the invasion; shortly afterward, Poland’s foreign minister expressed hope that Polish oil companies would gain access to oil reserves with the overthrow of the Saddam regime (Poland seeks, 2003). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2329

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2329
• XREF: connects to: The Bush Doctrine justified preemptive war to preserve oil-linked regional hegemony