Yesterday's WSJ: This is getting to be an old comment, about "yesterday's journal," but I leave for work well before my journal hits the front step. And I don't read it online, since I like reading the old-fashioned paper version. At any rate, Holman Jenkins explored the "war for oil" rationale yesterday. Definitively. It's not on Opinion Journal, unfortunately. Here's the bling:

In pursuit of such [oil] deals, Russia and France have persistently undermined sanctions and the effort to disarm Saddam and bring him into compliance with his own commitments by means short of war. "Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals," Iraq's U.N. ambassador explained to the Washington Post a year ago. "If the French and others take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit. This is the Iraqi policy."

Thus the huge Majnoun and Nahr Umr fields were reserved for TotalFinaElf, partly owned by the French government. Not even Jacques Chirac can pretend that such concessions weren't France's reward for acquiescing in Iraq's diligent strategy to escape sanctions and resume its pursuit of exotic weapons.

No wonder why the French want to worm their way back into Iraq after the shooting stops. Worth reading it all if you subscribe.