Forget the oil angle, its simply not a factor; Iraq is controlled by a madman with ties to Al-Qaeda. Besides nuclear worries, there are other items in Saddam's arsenal.
From a USA Today Article:
"Botulinum toxin, the most poisonous substance known, is about 100,000 times deadlier than the neurotoxin sarin, which was used in an attack on Tokyo subways in 1995 that killed 10 and sent 5,000 people streaming into hospitals.
The toxin was so popular among Iraqi bioweapons scientists that they claimed to have produced botulinum toxin on an industrial scale. After the Gulf War, Iraq told U.N. weapons inspectors that it had stockpiled nearly 20,000 liters of toxin in solution in anticipation of a U.S. attack. Some of it, Iraq said, had been loaded into more than 100 solution-filled ''wet bombs,'' which were never used.
Security analysts believe Iraq's bioweapons arsenal is much larger than Iraqi leaders acknowledge. Even the experts can only guess at what Iraqi biologists have cooked up since 1998, when U.N. inspections ended.
If a bioterrorist were to release a cloud of botulinum in a major city, 50,000 people would get sick, and 30,000 of them would die without antitoxin treatment, according to a report released this year by the National Academy of Sciences ( news - web sites)' Institute of Medicine ( news - web sites), a think tank financed partly by Congress.
Because 80% to 90% of the beds in any intensive care unit in any given city are usually full -- and because most cities have just a few hundred intensive care beds -- fewer than 100 cases of botulism could lock up every intensive care ward in a city like San Francisco for weeks, says James Marks of the University of California-San Francisco, an author of the report."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...=676&u=/usatoday/20020926/ts_usatoday/4483176
