That reminded me of how I tell those who aren't into the political arena of things. I tell them to think of oil as something that can be gardened. You have two gardeners, one who continually plants her oil in the same spot year after year, each year her yield gets smaller and less because she pulls out all the nutrients without replacing them. She is just concerned about instance profits. The other gardener moves her garden around from plot to plot each year taking special concern to let mother nature along with her own care of adding nutrients back into the soil so each year she has a plentiful bounty each year. The first gardener is representative of foreign oil, they will take their plots and run it for profits until their is nothing left. The second gardener is representative of the US, they will buy the oil of foreign plots while their land of oil is nurtured in anticipation of a bountiful future stock. I can't believe someone actually said to me once, well if we run out of oil we'll just go bomb them and take their oil. I said not without oil to produce the gas.

Over the few years though I've come to think of it as it really never was about profits per say to the US as much as it was about who in the ME was profiting off the oil and their intended purpose for those profits.