Saddam Hussein charges that the Bush administration’s real goal in its campaign to overthrow him is to seize Iraq’s oil. Not so, says the White House. “The only interest the United States has in the region is furthering the cause of peace and stability, not his ability to generate oil,” spokesman Ari Fleischer told The New York Times. But when he was asked whether a victorious American army wouldn’t end up administering Iraq’s oil fields, Mr. Fleischer said he “wouldn’t even try to start guessing what the military may or may not do.”

Still, signs keep cropping up that Iraq’s oil does, indeed, lurk in the background as an issue and perhaps as a pivotal issue. For starters, consider the oil industry careers of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney. They can’t help being aware of the interest of the major American oil companies in getting into the exploration and development of Iraq’s 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia’s and five times the U.S. reserves. Oil was on Mr. Cheney’s mind when he made a public speech in California denouncing Mr. Hussein: “He sits on top of 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. He has enormous wealth being generated by that. And left to his own devices, it’s the judgment of many of us that in the not too distant future he will acquire nuclear weapons.”

If American oil companies have their eyes on Iraqi oil, so do the French, Russian and Chinese companies. Hard-line advocates of a war to topple Saddam have charged that their interests in Iraqi oil had been behind their opposition in the United Nations Security Council to U.S. demands for a resolution authorizing an American offensive. In response, American negotiators have been quietly assuring France, Russia and China that their interests will be respected in a post-war Iraq.

One of the earliest and most outspoken advocates of war with Iraq, former CIA Director James Woolsey has been warning those other permanent members of the Security Council that they had best stick with the United States. He told ABC’s “Nightline” program: “If we play our cards right, I think we can get them to see that it is not wise for them to continue to back a loser. And I think Saddam is going to lose.”

Still, this black gold mine that Saddam is sitting on has its drawbacks. Daniel Yergin, author of “The Prize,” a history of the oil industry, told “Nightline” that it will take years and billions in investment before Iraq’s oil industry can replace its rusty pipelines and restore its neglected oil fields pump more that it pumps today. “This notion that somehow this is going to become an American oil lake and other countries are going to be excluded, I don’t think that’s the way the world will work. If you come in by yourself, you’re going to have to write a big check by yourself. You want other people to share the risk with you.”

So oil is clearly in the picture, but not quite the bonanza for American oil companies that some may imagine.