[ 10 points leading up to a not-related-to-oil invasion of Iraq ]
But it's full of things like:
> 2. Bush Sr. made it clear he had no intention of
> accepting Saddam's continued postwar rule over Iraq. Why?
> Because you don't fuck with the USA.
There are plenty of countries in the world who "fuck with the USA" and don't get toppled. What's the difference here with Iraq?
To ignore the oil angle in Iraq is to read the wrong book.
To me it's simple: you can "fuck with" the US all you like, so long as you Play Ball[*]. In the case of Iraq, Playing Ball was meant to be a foil to Saudi Arabia's dominance in the Middle East, and be a strategic pawn when it was appropriate to US's interests. You get the phone call; you do the dance. Saddam always wanted a bit more for doing that dance, and it got in the way of Playing Ball. After Kuwait, the message was: we could have crushed you but we didn't; now get back in there and Play Ball. When he didn't do that, pressure was added in the form of sanctions, but a country under sanction can't Play Ball (c.f. Iraq's oil production drop during those years). By then it snowballed until it was clear that he was never going to Play Ball and thus must be replaced. If Iraq Oil Inc. was an above-the-board subsidiary, he would have simply been called into the Board Room and fired. Instead, the US had to wait until Something Really Bad Happened. 9/11 happened. It wasn't great -- they'd have to doctor up the evidence to make it look hunky-dory, but it was Good Enough.
All of your numbered points are like this (ignoring the elephant in the room) but here's a particularly good one:
> 6. At this point, the neoconservatives for the first time started a
> serious public campaign to inject the idea of invading Iraq into the
> national debate. Big milestone. Regime-changing Saddam becomes a major
> neocon policy plank. Why? It would be wrong to look for some specific
> rational goal.
There was a specific rational goal (again: notional control -- meaning specifically not under the control of Saudi Arabia -- of oil in the Middle East), it's just that it had been in the works for 20+ years (probably at least since the policy disaster of 1973) without much success. The idea that they Just Came Up With This is shortsighted. They didn't come up with the idea then; the idea had been on the table the whole time. What the neocons came up with at that point was the confidence that they could accomplish the action that served the goal.
/jordan
[*] Of course there is another potential Ball Player in the area: Iran. And Iran *was* the US's ball player until the revolution in 1979. At that point, it was clear that Iran could not be the US's player, and so Iraq was cultivated instead.