``...Where does this desperation for war come from?
There are many things driving President Bush and his administration to invade Iraq, unseat Saddam Hussein and take over the country. But the biggest one is hidden and very, very simple. It is about the currency used to trade oil and consequently, who will dominate the world economically, in the foreseeable future -- the USA or the European Union...'' (Not Oil, but Dollars vs. Euros, Geoffrey Heard)
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Patrick Bond had a better take on this sketched out, which I hope he will develop and put up for the list. I should buy his book and figure it out, but in the meantime...
It basically involves overlapping and competing forces that are converging in a series international political-economic crises which both converge on and diverge from US imperialism and its activities. That imperialism takes differing forms ranging from Clinton's globalised, corporate and multilateral neoliberalism to Bush's unilateral xenophobic and righwing petro-military-industrial version.
The war on Iraq emerges out of the fog of these crisis as one among many other conflicting fronts where for example competition over currency standards forms another front.
None of these form a direct cause of war, since the cause of the war is the decision by Bush and his petro-military junta to declare war. Rather these international and national forces surround the war with an elaborated context, where the war appears as an intelligible event. In this sense, the war is surrounded by multiple tiers of significance, rather than causes.
The bottom line is nothing `drove' Bush to attack Iraq. He and his junta decided to make war on Iraq. They did so principally to demonstrate US military power and intimate the rest of the world, period.
Chuck Grimes