Juan Cole's admirable clarity: "In the cases both of Iraq and of Deepwater Horizon, oil men were trying to get a big reserves of petroleum that had earlier been out of their reach. Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of oil had been put off limits by sanctions pushed for in Congress by, among others, the Israel lobbies. The Deepwater Horizon lay deep under the Gulf of Mexico, under a mile of water and 2 further miles of the earth’s crust — the deepest oil well in history…"