Texas crude

Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this has fallen to just 2 million barrels.

Dr Mamdouh Salameh, an oil economist to the World Bank & the UN Industrial Development Organisation, told a British parliamentary committee last month that Iraq had offered the US a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened ten new giant oil fields on "generous terms", in return for lifting sanctions. "This would have certainly prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq & annex its oil."