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 Hu

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.