Beck is a skeptic of the "blood for oil" explanation of the war in Iraq
"[it] loses much of its explanatory power the closer one looks. The idea that the government worried only about the price of oil going too high forgets that the oil market includes buyers as well as sellers. Oil companies are constituents, too, and the more prevalent worry within the industry was that a supply glut would drive prices so low as to make their operations unprofitable" (242)
262-3: "By the twenty-first century, Americas' national self-interest was much more internationalized than the blood-for-oil partisans understood [...] America wanted to turn Iraq into a country that functioned just like all the other countries that counted themselves members of the modern global economy"
263: "The invasion was an attempt to force Iraq t join the twenty-first century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economies of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America's global leadership."
262: It was meant "to turn Iraq into a source of profits for the whole developed world"
this counter-hypothesis developed from an analysis of Bremer's "100 Orders"