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Admittedly, I'm only 30 so I was an angsty teen who blindly opposed it and everything the Bush administration did. I've only recently been starting to rebuild s

Admittedly, I'm only 30 so I was an angsty teen who blindly opposed it and everything the Bush administration did. I've only recently been starting to rebuild some faith in government (what a time to do so). > US disregarded that and still decided to invade. No one had a single doubt that this was about oil. I remember that being what everyone cried in opposition to the war with Iraq but I never understood it. How did oil factor into the war?

jacquesm 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Economic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Economic https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/the-wars-that-really-are-about-the-oil/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/the-wars-that-really-are... http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhas...
boomboomsubban 9y ago
The US and UK currently control 35% of the oil reserves in Iraq, and US/UK companies made huge amounts of money rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed in both wars.
Kadin 9y ago
Oil is an oversimplification. The US could have just bought all the oil it wanted from Iraq at market prices for less than the cost of going to war, and the Hussein regime would have been happy to sell it at those same prices. So that doesn't really fly as a whole explanation. The Bush Adm. had its eyes on Iraq pre-9/11. It's mostly forgotten now, but there were Tomahawk cruise missile attacks on Iraq in the summer of 2001. I remember discussing it and even noted in a journal entry that summer that it looked like G.W.B. wanted to go back and finish G.H.W.B.'s job. It was not as straightforward as just oil. I think that eventually history will settle on it being a more complex set of factors, some of which boiled down to personal animosity by the President, and a feeling that Hussein had been given a free pass by the US in 1991 and was using it to thumb his nose at the West and, in doing so, was in a position to build up power and status within the region on the basis of having "survived" a US-led invasion and deposition attempt. To conservative hawks, his continued existence was a reminder of US failure and impotence, which didn't fit with the US's unipolar, pax Americana / "hyperpower" ambitions at the time. It wasn't a war for territory as much as it was a very public execution (or, politely, "regime change"), pour encourager les autres. Hussein was a dead man, in retrospect, when G.W.B. got elected; it just took the administration a while to figure out how to get the war they'd wanted from the beginning out of the post-9/11 environment. Absent 9/11, if you look at what was going on during the early months of the G.W. Bush presidency, they would probably have found a way to push Hussein into giving them a casus belli anyway (it's not like Saddam was the most level-headed dictator; given the resources of the entire State Department, one can safely assume the US would have come up with a way of making him overreach, and then grab that overreach to pull him off the cliff and into destruction). The oil and strategic position of Iraq viz. Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc., certainly helped make the case and pushed aside what might have been probable objections (if we invade, how can we survive an oil boycott, a la 1973?), but saying that it was a "war for oil" as is sometimes claimed doesn't really wash. You don't need to go to war for oil at the price the US goes to war for, you just buy the damn oil. You go to war for things you can't buy with money.
- wybiral 9y ago
  Thanks. That sounds more plausible. I'd suspected it had more to do with Iran/Russia but Bush Jr probably did come into office with some agenda. I still don't understand why everyone keeps bringing this up as evidence that our approach towards NK is war mongering. Maybe some attention to NK has more to do with China and Russia than people tend to focus on, but it doesn't mean NK isn't a bad actor.
Iv 9y ago
"Oil" is a kind of summary but not the over-simplification that we often make it sound like. Iraq has the 5th oil reserves in the world and posed no threats to US and was not financing terrorism. If anything it kept Iran busy which would be in US' interest. The true motivations of the different actors are diverse and as the president and his team is effectively above the law since Obama said he would not open an investigation for war crimes, we will have only speculations. Bush may have had the willingness to continue his father's job or just simple religious beliefs: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/a... Dick Cheney is the salient case for oil. He had enormous conflicts of interest, having led Halliburton, who reaped enormous war contracts in Iraq. John Kerry called for an investigation in 2004 about that: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-cheney-and-halliburton.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-cheney... We also know that hundreds of millions of dollars were erroneously/fraudulently charged to the US: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/09/arianna-huffington/halliburton-kbr-and-iraq-war-contracting-history-s/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/... Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are core believer of the "Project for the New American Century" thinktank that sees the war against terrorism as WW4 (Cold War being WW3) and sees seizing oil resources as primordial. Yes, this is a really simplistic vision, but remember that these people are just slightly more intellectual than Trump's team...

jacquesm 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Economic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Economic https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/the-wars-that-really-are-about-the-oil/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/the-wars-that-really-are... http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhas...

boomboomsubban 9y ago

The US and UK currently control 35% of the oil reserves in Iraq, and US/UK companies made huge amounts of money rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed in both wars.

Kadin 9y ago

Oil is an oversimplification. The US could have just bought all the oil it wanted from Iraq at market prices for less than the cost of going to war, and the Hussein regime would have been happy to sell it at those same prices. So that doesn't really fly as a whole explanation. The Bush Adm. had its eyes on Iraq pre-9/11. It's mostly forgotten now, but there were Tomahawk cruise missile attacks on Iraq in the summer of 2001. I remember discussing it and even noted in a journal entry that summer that it looked like G.W.B. wanted to go back and finish G.H.W.B.'s job. It was not as straightforward as just oil. I think that eventually history will settle on it being a more complex set of factors, some of which boiled down to personal animosity by the President, and a feeling that Hussein had been given a free pass by the US in 1991 and was using it to thumb his nose at the West and, in doing so, was in a position to build up power and status within the region on the basis of having "survived" a US-led invasion and deposition attempt. To conservative hawks, his continued existence was a reminder of US failure and impotence, which didn't fit with the US's unipolar, pax Americana / "hyperpower" ambitions at the time. It wasn't a war for territory as much as it was a very public execution (or, politely, "regime change"), pour encourager les autres. Hussein was a dead man, in retrospect, when G.W.B. got elected; it just took the administration a while to figure out how to get the war they'd wanted from the beginning out of the post-9/11 environment. Absent 9/11, if you look at what was going on during the early months of the G.W. Bush presidency, they would probably have found a way to push Hussein into giving them a casus belli anyway (it's not like Saddam was the most level-headed dictator; given the resources of the entire State Department, one can safely assume the US would have come up with a way of making him overreach, and then grab that overreach to pull him off the cliff and into destruction). The oil and strategic position of Iraq viz. Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc., certainly helped make the case and pushed aside what might have been probable objections (if we invade, how can we survive an oil boycott, a la 1973?), but saying that it was a "war for oil" as is sometimes claimed doesn't really wash. You don't need to go to war for oil at the price the US goes to war for, you just buy the damn oil. You go to war for things you can't buy with money.

wybiral 9y ago
Thanks. That sounds more plausible. I'd suspected it had more to do with Iran/Russia but Bush Jr probably did come into office with some agenda. I still don't understand why everyone keeps bringing this up as evidence that our approach towards NK is war mongering. Maybe some attention to NK has more to do with China and Russia than people tend to focus on, but it doesn't mean NK isn't a bad actor.

Iv 9y ago

"Oil" is a kind of summary but not the over-simplification that we often make it sound like. Iraq has the 5th oil reserves in the world and posed no threats to US and was not financing terrorism. If anything it kept Iran busy which would be in US' interest. The true motivations of the different actors are diverse and as the president and his team is effectively above the law since Obama said he would not open an investigation for war crimes, we will have only speculations. Bush may have had the willingness to continue his father's job or just simple religious beliefs: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/a... Dick Cheney is the salient case for oil. He had enormous conflicts of interest, having led Halliburton, who reaped enormous war contracts in Iraq. John Kerry called for an investigation in 2004 about that: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-cheney-and-halliburton.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-cheney... We also know that hundreds of millions of dollars were erroneously/fraudulently charged to the US: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/09/arianna-huffington/halliburton-kbr-and-iraq-war-contracting-history-s/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/... Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are core believer of the "Project for the New American Century" thinktank that sees the war against terrorism as WW4 (Cold War being WW3) and sees seizing oil resources as primordial. Yes, this is a really simplistic vision, but remember that these people are just slightly more intellectual than Trump's team...