Since Iraq’s formation, academic, official, and vernacular conversations about Iraqi oil have often presumed the presence of a dichotomy in oil’s role in Iraqi politics. The dichotomy assumes that political disputes or foreign interventions in Iraq are either “about the oil” or are not. Therefore, some discourses on Iraqi oil--such as those advanced by anti-imperialists and by claimants in disputes over Kirkuk’s status--argue that it is an object of corporate greed or hegemonic desire by a particular government. From this perspective, the desire to invade Iraq or to control an oil-bearing region is a desire to control oil for economic or strategic reasons. On the other hand, Western officials insist that their interests in Iraq are not related to oil. Similarly, the same claimants in Iraqi land disputes assert that their own motives, unlike their opponents’, stem from culturally authentic stakes in the land in question rather than from resource-inspired avarice. I posit that the abovementioned ideas constitute a false dilemma that obscures more significant political dynamics. Using Arabic-language discourses on oil and British and American archives, I seek to analyze the many anxieties surrounding Iraqi oil since the era of the British mandate. In doing so, I argue that these anxieties originated in the unequal power relations inherent in the early Iraqi oil industry that coincided with the salience of anti-imperialism and the ideology of self-determination. The knowledge and technology differentials between the British government, the British-registered Iraq Petroleum Company, and the Iraqi government necessitated the latter’s reliance on foreign concessions to extract, refine and export oil. As a result, oil became a site of anti-imperialist criticism as well as a source of tension for the British and, eventually, American governments. The spectacle of oil’s impact via modernization projects expanded oil discourse both in Iraq and beyond, ensuring that it would always be a subtext in Iraqi politics and foreign relations. The idea that any invasion or land dispute in Iraq has “nothing to do with oil” is false: the cultural, political and economic complex of oil is always present in these circumstances. At the same time, control of Iraqi oil--itself an illusory idea--is never a sole motive. The frameworks of these conversations, whether they concern Western intervention in an oil-producing Middle Eastern country or resolving the status of a disputed oil-bearing territory, must transform to incorporate a more nuanced, and therefore more accurate, conception of oil.