Privatizing war.

The problems with your explanation are legion. Just a couple of points of fact:

1) Iraqi oil was already flowing on the market. If we wanted more and at better prices, dropping UN sanctions--which Russia, China, France, etc. would have jumped to agree to--would have done the job much more cheaply and quickly.

2) There is currently no evidence that the US has or had any intention of taking Iraq's oil or the profits thereof. If we took over the country to get the oil, seems kind of daft of us to let the Iraqi's keep that which we went in to steal for ourselves, now doesn't it?

But please, you were writing...? :wink:

This war was not about WMD, though they were tangentially part of the argument that Saddam had to go. This war was not about oil, except in the way that all Middle East policy springs from the fact that the region is chock full of the stuff. This war was the result of a vision of a fundamentally different Middle East from the one we have today, and how we might get there from here.

I'm not claiming the plan will work. I'm just telling you that was--and remains--the plan.

Nope, that's not the reason we were given, Scrat.
A pre-emptive war based on lies is an aggressive war.

referring to the resumption of hostilities after a ceasefire has been broken by a signatory thereto as a "preemptive war", is a bit like breaking your parole and then complaining that the police "preemptively" arrested you.

And I didn't state that I would offer the reason you were given, I stated that I'd give you the actual reason for the war.

I am thinking that Iraq did indeed violate the terms of settlement following Gulf I, I am not aware that the US was a signatory to any ceasefire, so I tend to think that the analogy of the police "preemptively" arresting anyone is more likely some neighbor of a police office deciding that the police had not properly done their job and went on a campaign to lynch a suspected felon, but us radicals tend to think in funny ways.

Hah! So now it's become a "resumption of hostilities"! What a friggin joke! I don't go for your revisionist history. I was there too.

Be sure to send that to president shrub. he could use it too!

If you were to say a bunch (or a few) neighbors, deciding to lynch a known rapist, and murder, for the suspicion of embezzling, then I would agree.

Are you suggesting that the US had no role in UN 687 or 1441?

And who you callin' a radical, pal? :wink: