Of course not. While I think the war was motivated by greed and malice, the idea that U.S. would simply steal Iraqi oil was always a huge oversimplification.
Of course, not. I am not even sure where you are going with the question.
No Chinese troops have occupied any portion of U.S. territory and China has not used force or the threat of force to install a pro-Chinese regime in Washington. (Even Russia avoided using force to install a pro-Russian U.S. government.) As noted, above, discussions of ways to invade Iraq were already under way by February, 2001, one month after the inauguration and seven months before the WTC/Pentagon attacks gave Bush the nonsense excuse to manufacture a reason to invade Iraq. Richard Clarke has reported that the day after the WTC/Pentagon attacks, GWB personally ordered him to find a connection between the attacks and Iraq, after ignoring months of attempts by multiple intelligence agencies to draw the administration’s attention to the dangers from al Qaeda.
China does not want U.S. resources, just our money (and a “hands off” policy to let them dominate Southeast Asia).
I don’t get this obsession with Iraqi oil being the cause of the invasion. If the US had wanted Iraqi oil, all they would have had to do was lift the embargo. Iraq would have been happy to sell the oil to anyone. As for the argument about paying for the oil, the people supposedly dead-set on getting the oil are used to paying for the product and then marking it up to a significant profit. Plenty of money would have been passed around after lifting the embargo. I simply don’t believe Bush/Cheney/Powell etc. were greedy or short-sighted enough to think that having the US directly move the oil would have brought enough extra money in to justify starting a war.
An exaggeration, by my understanding. The average Iraqi, as in many authoritarian regimes, led a banal life as long as they kept their head down and didn’t challenge the authorities. Iraq had universal healthcare and education, and as noted earlier, fairly liberal gender norms for the region. The sanctions devastated the country, so you could place some of the blame for that on Saddam Hussein, though I don’t think the West looks particularly noble in that moral calculation.
The neocon’s desire to turn Iraq into an American client state is certainly more complex and ideological than mere oil profits, but when analyzing imperial actions it’s important not to conflate private, class based interests with nation-states. In this example, the privately owned energy companies would be the ones directly profiting off Iraqi oil, whereas the public would be the ones paying the cost of the war and occupation. Private profits, socialized costs.