Then I guess it all boils down to GW wanting Saddam´s ass; or in his own words “fuck Saddam!”. Churchill he ain´t… 
You know, this whole idea that keeps coming up that the “real” reason for war in Iraq was oil just really bothers me. I have never once seen anything from one of the masterminds of the war talk about the need for war to use Iraqi oil for American benefit, it is a notably undiscussed justification for war among those who supported it, and finally, those who keep talking about it can’t seem to get their conspiracy theories straight.
Some say that the neocons wanted all the oil in Iraq for ourselves, so the US could have an endless supply of oil cheaper than what the rest of the world would get. (Nevermind that this idea is complete nonsense, because macroeconomics 101 would teach anyone that in a global market for oil, every country is going to pay just about the same price.) Others say that the forces of darkness wanted to invade Iraq to drive up oil prices so Exxon and Shell could profit more. Well, which is it?
And don’t get me started on that flat-out dumb blog entry provided by **antechinus **about how the neocons wanted to privitize Iraq’s oil industry but were stymied by the guy Jay Garner put in charge of the Oil Ministry. Puh-leeze. Garner was driven out of his job in a matter of weeks, if the shadowy overlords wanted to privatize the oil industry, they could have done it.
I fully agree with most of the others here that there were multiple reasons why war supporters wanted to invade Iraq. WMD, 9/11, hating Saddam, radical Wilsonian liberalism, and even human rights concerns were all valid reasons that can be sourced and cited to war supporters. (Note for the record that I disagreed with all of those reasons as justifying war.) However, this oil business is just a piece of truthiness contrived by a small number of anti-war people who, for some reason, can’t grasp that the whole war wasn’t just a terrible blunder, embarassment, and stain on our country, but rather are convinced it just had to be part of a larger, more nefarious plan.
Well, I don’t know. You could argue that a stable Shi’ite-dominated Iraq would be better for Iran than what you have now. Better for Iran, and better for George Bush – how’s that for an irony?
And by the way, Ravenman, I totally agree with you. Too many people got stuck on the “No blood for oil” slogan, and never looked beyond.
[Quotes on the American Interest in Iraqi Oil]
(http://zfacts.com/p/682.html)
Please. Oil was certainly a factor.
Sage Rat:
Except that we damn well knew this about him by fall of 2004 but that didn’t seem to have made the one change that might’ve mattered 
That’s a really sorry compilation of glurge that does not link oil with the actual war at all. Well, let me take that back, the Rumsfeld quote talks about how oil has nothing to do with the war.
It is completely obvious to anyone who has a pulse that the U.S. has an interest in the oil producing regions of the world. But there’s a leap from that interest to alleging that “having an interest in” means “going to invade because of.”
Honestly, RedFury, I’m just puzzled with that list of quotes you posted. What in there do you count as the smoking gun that links this general idea of oil with the decision for war on March 19, 2002? How do you read those quotes, which to my eyes do not contain any coherent argument that war is necessary because of “oil,” and come away so certain? I’m just mystified by this leap of logic. On a narrower issue, do you think that the US invaded to acheive low oil prices to benefit our petro-hungry economy, or to increase the price of oil to benefit U.S. oil company profits?
Finally, I have to say that we had nearly complete access to Iraqi oil BEFORE the invasion through the Oil for Food program, in contrast to our total embargo on Iranian oil. If we wanted to control oil, why wouldn’t we invade Iran, a place from which we get ZERO oil, rather than Iraq, a place from which we bought as much as we wished?
Largely because it seemed that the choice seemed to come down to staying the course or pulling out. I would like to see the job finished, and certainly not for the country (Iraq) to implode any time soon. Up to the point where Bush starts calling for genocide in Iraq, the Iraqi people are still probably better off with the US in charge than fairing for themselves. And, hopefully in the next election the big debate won’t be whether to pull out or not, but rather how and if we can fix Iraq.
Just my opinion of course. There was some post about the boards once which did seem to support the idea that GW had already intended/hoped to return to Iraq before 9/11. I can’t recall what the gist of it was, though.
My opinion on Iraq was that Bush & Co thought that the removal of Sadaam would allow the creation of a moderate pro-Western state. This new Iraq would provide competition to Saudi Arabia for the sale of oil. It would also be a strategic ally in which to influence Syria and Iran. Kind of like another Egypt, but with oil.
They picked Iraq because they believed the military would be easy to conquer (which it was), the people didn’t like Saddam (which they didn’t) and it was a natural extension of the first Gulf War. Plus they just didn’t like Saddam.
What they didn’t take into account was the fact that Iraqi society consists of a number of factions held in check by Saddams ruthlessness.
Amongst other facts they “didn’t take into account”. Many, many others.
“Leaving [Iraq] before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom.”
– George W. Bush, last Wednesday (August 16th)
Straight from the horse’s… well, you pick the part.
rjung, the fact that that was last Wednesday makes it sort of beside the point. It only means that the original rationale for the war has been so lost in the mists of history – mists that Rufus Xavier is valiantly trying to peer through – that the administration is now just grabbing at whatever reed it can.
Is anybody actually counting the number of rationales the administration has burned through?
I see it more as “All the other excuses have failed; we’ll have to resort to the truth.”
Well, of course it’s about oil in the general sense that almost anything that happens in the M.E. is “about oil”. But there isn’t a good case that can be made for the idea that we went into Iraq in order to get their oil for us (or for some oil executive friends of Bush). That’s what **Ravenman **is saying (I think).
As for the OP: you think you finally understand Iraq? Have you considered donating your brain to science?
You’re saying the Bush administration is telling the truth? Just wait till I let your friends know!
And I am not completetly disagreeing with either of you – just saying that oil most certainly played a pert in chosing to invade.
Problem with cites is, that’ll you’ll find all/most of the ones I post, “extreme left” “pinko commies” “conspiracy-mongers,” etc. etc.
To wit:
From 1998 Letter to Bill Clinton from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle
At that link you’ll find many other references to the PNAC, their objectives and how they went about hijacking American foreign policy.
Or how about Wiki and the refences to the infamous Cheney Secret Energy Task Force and the papers revealed years later through the Freedom of Information Act?
Try following that trail and see what you come up with. You might get a bit of a surprise
In sum, no, I don’t believe oil was the sole reason, but rather that it played a part – and not a small one either – in the geopolitcal goals behind the invasion.
And I am not completetly disagreeing with either of you – just saying that oil most certainly played a pert in chosing to invade.
Problem with cites is, that’ll you’ll find all/most of the ones I post, “extreme left” “pinko commies” “conspiracy-mongers,” etc. etc.
To wit:
From 1998 Letter to Bill Clinton from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle
At that link you’ll find many other references to the PNAC, their objectives and how they went about hijacking American foreign policy.
Or how about Wiki and the refences to the infamous Cheney Secret Energy Task Force and the papers revealed years later through the Freedom of Information Act?
Try following that trail and see what you come up with. You might get a bit of a surprise. For instance (careful, this site might blow-up your monitors):
In sum, no, I don’t believe oil was the sole reason, but rather that it played a part – and not a small one either – in the geopolitcal goals behind the invasion.
Pardon the double posts. Blame the hamsters though. They appear to be extremely weak and in dire need of nourishment – post took about ten minutes to go through.
Board’s slower than molasses.
You can say that again! 
There can be no question that the geopolitical equation for Iraq is inextricably tied up in it’s oil production and proximity to the Persian Gulf. And it might even be that Bush and Cheney’s business dealings in the oil business made them overly sensitive to that part of the equation. There’s also no doubt that Bush and some members of his cabinet wanted to invade Iraq (9/11 or no 9/11). But even if you take the straght PNAC line, that wasn’t about grabbing oil. It might have been about securing the flow of oil, which the US and the develped world has a vested interest in, but that’s still different from the conspiracy theories that **Ravenman **brought up.
John, I’m going to start having to reevaluate my political views if we keep agreeing.
The point I’m making about the oil stuff is that there is nothing nefarious in believing that Iraq was a strategically important country because it has a lot of oil, just like Saudi is an important country, and so on. I think, RedFury, we’re agreed on that.
But what I have a big problem with is this idea that “the war was about oil,” as in, everything else was just some kind of smokescreen for the real agenda, oil and making people rich. It’s just malarky, and people have to jump through hoops to try to make that argument.
For example, the quote from the PNAC letter was edited to read: “…it hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction … a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard… The only acceptable strategy is … to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.”
Well, the original, unedited text reads: “It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.”
That, in my view, is quite a different spin than the first edited quote. But you don’t hear a lot of folks running around like Chicken Little yelling, “The war was all about protecting the safety of moderate Arab states!!” Why? Because it wasn’t the central case for war. What was it? The complete load of bull that Saddam was going to attack America. That and Bush wanted to be tough and get rid of someone he had built up in his own mind into being a fantasized 21st-century Hitler, when Saddam was in reality little more than a minor irritant to our country.