"To the victor goes the spoils" If I'm not mistaken, that is the universal understanding of what happens to the assets of the conquered after the conquest. Well, Iraq has beneath its sovereign soil the 4th largest oil reserve in the world. It is now pumping at before war levels and that revenue is "supposedly" going towards building up The new "useless" Governments coffers to help stabilize the country. Mean while we are still spending over 2 BILLION per Week for essentially the same thing! That 2 Billion is in actual dollars(borrowed from China) it doesn't figure in the additional costs of medical care and support for all those soldiers returning with injury and psychological problems! Nor the repair and replacement cost of all the equipment used and abused in this conflict. There are many other ancillary costs from a number of different aspects too. I am trying get the actual dollar amount that is being stuffed into the gov. coffers, as well I'm sure into their pockets, from the millions of barrels extracted from wells we fought and died to save and return to function. Saudi Arabia(OPEC) sits on the single largest reserve(264 billion barrels of oil) in the world. The price at the pumps in Riyadh, the capital, are a hefty .91 cents/gal (source-air-inc.com). They have flat out declined to increase production or reduce prices to help their Main Friend and Allie The US, after both Bush and Cheney personally made request for help. They have shown their true color. "Fair weather Friends" is what I call them.... I know all too well what that feels like! In hind sight it is probably better to start a realization of the dilemma that will confront us in the not so distant future(8 to 10 yrs) when we have depleted all the reserves on the planet........... 5/6/08 OK. Now that I've sorted it all. Let me see if I understand it correctly. We are now paying the highest price for gas in history correct? It funny because Exxon-Mobil is, coincidentally, also showing Profits that are higher than ever before in history. So, out of that 3.75 /gal we pay at the pump a portion of it is Gov. tax(our gov.) The same gov. that is giving Exxon-Mobile tax credits and tax breaks so they can use our(yours and mine)public lands for exploration to extract Crude oil from our (yours and mine) land to sell back to us at a hefty enough profit so they can give bonuses to their retiring CEOs (last yr 300 million BONUS to just one of them) And show a staggering 40 billion dollar profit! Meanwhile back at the "farm", the gov.(ours) is now paying farmers not to grow food but instead corn for ethanol (another "Shell" game being perpetuated on us). Which are driving prices up for food in our economy. Now, couple that with the rising cost of getting the food to your table and you can easily see why we are in the pre-dick-iment that we are! I don't want Any of these silly minuscule gas tax breaks being tossed around. What I want is for Exxon-Mobil to fax me (too costly to ship now) a BIG KISS... because that is really what I like to get while being F#$%^D!