Prior to the Iraq war Saddam was pressing the UN to lift a bunch of sanctions and courting Russian and European oil companies to come in and run their oil opera

Prior to the Iraq war Saddam was pressing the UN to lift a bunch of sanctions and courting Russian and European oil companies to come in and run their oil operations. By the time of the invasion Iraq's oil infrastructure had been gutted due to sanctions. This was a complete anathema to the PNAC psychos' vision of the Middle East [0]. They basically wanted to exact control over the majority share of OPEC producers for power over economic rivals (as they saw them). The PNAC [1] had been pushing for war in the Middle East from their founding in the 90s. They got a lot of buy-in from all the Nixonites in GWB's administration. Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans [2] that stovepiped unvetted intelligence from a bunch of Iraqi expats and exiles to push PNAC narratives to GWB. [0] https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans