> Marv Gandall asks:
>
>> What extraordinary advantage have US-based oil companies
>> obtained as a result of the occupation?
>
> Just because it didn't work out that way doesn't mean the theory wasn't in
> place at the time. You can't say that the Bush administration didn't do
> what they did because it didn't work out :-)
===========================
I think it was, and evidently remains, a fundamental misunderstanding that
the Bush administration was narrowly focused on Iraq and it's oil.
It had much larger strategic objectives, as I've previously written - notably, to provide a "demonstration effect" of overwhelming US military power to the rest of the world, particularly to Iran, North Korea, Libya, Venezuela, and Cuba. The neocons thought the Clinton administration too soft in it's treatment of America's nettlesome adversaries in the wake of the USSR's collapse, and it came into office pledged to do something about it. Their manifesto, the Project for a New American Century, gives a fuller appreciation that their ambitions extended far beyond Iraq. Recall their truculent boasts that they would "shock and awe" not only the Iraquis into submission, but equally the other members of the "axis of evil". Unless the Iranians and others hewed to American demands, they openly warned, Baghdad would be only the opening battle in a larger campaign.
Iraq was targeted as the starting point not because of it's oil, but because it was the weakest link, having been gravely weakened by sanctions and considered especially divided and vulnerable; the administration expected US military forces to be greeted as liberators by the Shia majority.
The US fell fall short of it's ambitions, as we now know, because of unexpected and widespread Sunni and Shia resistance, and this has perhaps contributed to the misperception that the purpose of the exercise was limited to Iraq.
The Bush administration hoped it would not to have to open additional military fronts against Iran, North Korea, and other anti-imperialist states - not all of them oil producers, let it be noted - but Afghanistan had given it a great deal of overweening confidence in Rumsfeld's New Model Army and it was prepared to do so. It hoped a swift and overwhelming invasion of Iraq would instead quickly bring these other states to the bargaining table to settle the US's various grievances against them. In Libya's case, the invasion had that intimidating effect, before the Iraqis began to mount a serious resistance which gave a reprieve to the other states in the administration's gunsights.
The administration, of course, could also not help but be cognizant of the effect another swift military victory following Afghanistan would have on their electoral prospects at home in the wake of 9/11.
Finally, the US oil industry was itself not lined up behind the invasion. I think it was Matt Taibibi who established this in interviews with oil executives shortly after it was launched. I'd have to consult my files.