The Third Gulf War, this one in the Gulf of Mexico

The First Gulf War:

1990: Iraq invades Kuwait.  The reasons are many, though a large one was territory.  In 1991, this led to an invasion of Iraq, by U.S. troupes, under the leadership of George H. W. Bush.

You can be sure that oil was an element; in fact, Iraq deliberately spilled oil into the Persian Gulf,

creating what has been considered the largest oil spill in history.  That is, until now.

The Second Gulf War (aka: the Iraq War)

1993 - present: the USA, with a small international coalition, invades Iraq, allegedly because it harbors "weapons of mass destruction."  Many Americans believed that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis had something to do with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001.  I'm not going to say too much more about this, though oh, so much could be said.  My link is to the Wikipedia entry on this ongoing war and hundreds of thousands of lives that it claimed.  If you go to the link, please go down to the section titled "Iraq awards oil contracts," where it briefly discusses how, in 2009, "the Iraqi ministry of oil awarded contracts to international oil companies for some of Iraq's many oil fields."


And now, we have:

The Third Gulf War:

 
April 20, 2010: an oil well blow out causes a catastrophic explosion at an oil rig located in the Gulf of Mexico, 40 miles South of Louisiana.  As you can see from my link, we already have a Wikipedia entry on this catastrophic disaster.  

On April 30, as this Al Jazeera story shows, President Barack Obama proposed the possibility of sending the military to "combat" this increasing enemy blob in the Gulf:

 

On May 5, the Russian Times made this rather extraordinary suggestion:

British Petroleum's ominously named "Top Kill" effort has turned out to be quite a disaster:

And U.S. citizens and politicians are taking sides as to whether or not this is the President's fault.

Let's face it: the wars over oil 

have moved right into the U.S.'s own beloved gulf,

and while we bicker over partisan positions,
that precious black gold

is spilling out, polluting the sea environment at rapid speeds.

Can't The Oil Industry, and the American people see: this may be the 

most treachourous Gulf War yet, and it's terribly ironic to me that, even
with our national demand for cheap oil,
we're watching while this bleeds into the Gulf of Mexico,
arguing about whether or not the government should take care of it,
taking polls on YouTube about whose fault it is.

Perhaps we're all to blame,
with hoggish demand for this
precious resource,
and our insistence that we
pay so much less for it than the rest of the world.

There's a strange case of kismet here:
we've fought some
horrible wars
over oil;
we're absolute slaves to it.
but we can't seem to
contain its hemmorhaging
into the sea just South of our own national shores.