Okay, anti-war peaceniks, whine all you like about the trillion-dollar occupation of Iraq. But do you know how big the Iraq oil reserves are, according to the latest and bestest estimates based on the latest record-high oil prices?Eighteen trillion dollars worth, that's how big. Here is a math lesson for you communists: This means the invasion and occupation has ultimately been a total bargain, because there's enough oil socked away in Iraq to pay for eighteen more invasions and occupations of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Army General John Abizaid, the now-retired CENTCOM commander, told an audience this weekend that "of course" the Iraq war is and always was about nothing more than seizing the oil fields.

"Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," Abizaid said during a round-table discussion thing at Stanford on Saturday. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan says the same thing in his new book, and everybody on the planet also knows this, but the White House continues to bizarrely pretend that the Iraq invasion and occupation was about something else, although nobody in the administration has been able to nail down exactly what.

Roundtable debates energy issues [Stanford Daily]