You can't miss the signs at any anti-war protest: "No Blood for Oil," "No War for Oil." A certain segment of the anti-war movement seems to be convinced that the apparently implacable progress toward war with Iraq is little more than a cover for an underhanded attempt to seize Iraq's vast oil resources for American and perhaps for British oil multinationals, who stand to be unjustly enriched courtesy of American military prowess and U.S. taxpayers.

Certain segments of the left act as if they view the use of oil, let alone making big money from oil, as inherently evil and rapacious to Mother Earth, perhaps on a par with owning a gun, doubting global warming or denying an abortion. So the claim that the coming war is all about oil carries a certain emotional resonance in these quarters.

I am inclined to view oil as one of many resources and to agree with Samuel Johnson that a person is seldom so innocently employed as when trying to make money. I suspect that the prospective war is more about global dominance, protecting Israel and geopolitical influence than about oil as such. Even so, it is doubtful that Iraq would be in the headlines if it didn't have oil reserves, and there is little question that oil is an important factor in examining the motives both of those eager for war and those opposed to it.

Perhaps we can sort some of it out.

A few basics first. Economist David R. Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who specialized in energy economics when he served on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan administration, told me that the world output of oil is about 73 million barrels per day.

Iraq now exports about 2 million barrels per day, and Henderson estimates that if sanctions were lifted it could export another 1 million to 2 million barrels per day. But it has proven reserves of 112 billion barrels (second only to Saudi Arabia), and industry experts believe another 250 billion barrels wait to be discovered with more aggressive exploration.

Iraq's oil infrastructure - pumping and drilling equipment, pipelines, storage facilities, etc. - is in sad shape due to damage done by the war with Iran in the 1980s, the 1991 gulf war, and a decade of economic sanctions. An L.A. Times story last week cited think tanks and petroleum consultants to estimate that it would cost about $40 billion over the next 10 years or so to develop Iraq's proven reserves to their full potential.

A consortium of mostly European companies was formed in 1928 to exploit Iraq's petroleum resources, and American companies got an increasing share of the business over the years. In 1972 the Iraqi government (not yet formally controlled by Saddam Hussein) nationalized the oil industry. Americans still operated there until the late 1980s, but the Iraqis gave special consideration to French companies and tilted toward the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War.

With the economic sanctions in Iraq after the 1991 gulf war, the U.S. government forbade U.S. companies from investing directly in Iraq, though the United States until recently got about 1 million barrels per day of its oil from Iraq. The Iraqi government has entertained bids and negotiations with oil companies and interests from more than a dozen countries, chiefly France, China and Russia, to develop oil fields, refurbish facilities or explore undeveloped tracts. Russia still believes Iraq owes it about $8 billion stemming from pre-gulf war agreements. Paris-based TotalFinaElf negotiated but didn't sign a deal valued at $7 billion to develop two of Iraq's largest oil fields. Even a tiny Irish company recently signed a contract that a war and a new government could put in jeopardy.

Most authorities believe that a new government in Iraq controlled or heavily influenced by the United States (directly or indirectly) would be more than open to entertaining bids from American and British companies and that the French, Russian and Chinese could be left out in the cold. So American companies (including Orange County's Fluor, which has already submitted a bid through the U.S. Agency for International Development to repair roads, hospitals and the like and has expertise in large-scale construction projects) could be in line for lucrative opportunities, though most U.S. companies decline to speculate in public when journalists approach them.

So it's a war for oil, right? Not necessarily.

For starters, as both Henderson and Ivan Eland, director of security studies at Oakland's Independent Institute, reminded me, the most economically efficient way to get access to Iraq's oil would not be to wage a war, but to eliminate sanctions and operate in a relatively open marketplace. If cheap and plentiful oil is the goal, waging war is an expensive tactic, one fraught with uncertainty and risk.

Eland is eager to point out that the notion that oil is a particularly vital resource that must be defended through the threat and occasional use of U.S. military might (a doctrine formally enshrined in U.S. national security strategy during the Carter administration when the Persian Gulf was proclaimed a vital U.S. security interest) is dubious at best.

"We don't go to war to protect our supply of semiconductors, but about half the U.S. defense budget is devoted to 'defending' oil supplies," Eland told me. "But the world oil market is larger than the Persian Gulf, and substitutes, though often more expensive, are available for almost any material deemed strategic, including oil." Henderson adds, "When you come down to it, whoever controls the Persian Gulf needs to sell oil more desperately than we need to buy it. Restricting the flow would be self-defeating."

A war with Iraq could be about controlling oil supplies and sending resources to companies and countries on the "right" side of the military conflict. It could be about using control of oil to enhance geopolitical influence. But it's not about cheap and plentiful oil. The best way to assure cheap and plentiful oil would be to declare peace and open trade.

I suspect the determination to have a war with Iraq has more to do with a near-messianic sense of mission than with crude calculations about who profits - although there will be economic winners and losers and more than likely people on the sidelines quietly nudging policy. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that's potentially more destabilizing and threatening to peace and prosperity than a crude dash for crude?