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The Middle East is a crust floating on a gigantic pool of oil. Is this why the region is racked by war? The question has been chewed over again and again, notably by Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington, who argued in 1993 that war was a clash of cultures, not a struggle for resources. In Blood and Oil (Penguin, £7.99), Michael Klare sets out to show that war and resources are inextricably linked – and succeeds. Unless we control our use of energy, he warns, demand for oil will lead to more wars.