Unfortunately, it is also completely wrong. There are easier ways to get at Iraq's oil than invading, and the United States can get its oil elsewhere. If anything, the last thing oil companies — and according to the theory, Bush and Cheney by extension — want is volatility in the oil market. And with the exception of the first Gulf War, the United States has never engaged in a resource war — as the world's largest economy, there are easier ways to get what we want. Blood will be shed in Iraq, but not for oil.

So why say it? Quite simply, because "No Blood for Oil" is in line with proven protest strategies and ideas. It worked in the first Gulf War. It is consistent with the anti-globalization movement to which the current protest movement owes so much of its momentum. And it builds on the quasi-Marxist theory that underlies so many of the guiding principles behind the last 100 years of protest culture: that the United States, regardless of who's in the Oval Office and what is the foreign policy crisis at hand, will stop at nothing to expand its control over world resources. If we are not actually imperialists in the classical sense, it is only because we have found a better way. Who needs to own territory when you can, through military might, force the resources of those territories to come to you?

Whether this was ever true is a topic for another column. The point is, though, that it is no longer true. The very world that allows organizers to coordinate hundreds of synchronous protests also makes direct control over resources irrelevant. Thanks to the telecommunications revolution, international markets are infinitely more fluid than they were just 12 years ago. If for some reason we needed more oil, we could simply manipulate spot markets elsewhere, or lean on OPEC to increase its output (and again, thanks to the fluidity of markets, OPEC has much less control over global oil output than it once did).

As a result, "No Blood for Oil" is both necessary to the movement's cohesion and ultimately self-defeating. It brings people together, but it also delegitimizes the movement in the eyes of the larger public. It reeks of the same sort of far-left sermonizing that has long turned off middle-class America, and its simplicity strikes many more as both naïve and deeply cynical. It is neither nuanced nor relevant to the current conflict. While there are many reasons to oppose the war, this isn't one of them. Unfortunately, for many it is the only one that seems to make sense.