Why Iraq War

Good as any other explanation. Via Andrew Sullivan

1. World, but especially Chinese, demand for oil had been growing and continues to grow exponentially.
2. Western and western-friendly oil assets are either all in sustained decline or approaching the point of decline from peak oil production.
3. The last time world oil discovery outpaced world oil consumption was twenty years ago.
4. The remaining massive, potentially politically accessible deposits of oil left remaining available to the industrialized West were all contained in the Middle East.

Under these conditions the Iraq War makes sense geo-strategically, politically, in fact in almost every way. Regime change creates a secure client state in the middle of the world’s last remaining great oil patch at time of dwindling supplies. It protects Israel, and so satisfies the pro-Israel part of the party. Insofar as it uses the rhetoric of ‘freedom versus terrorism’ it can be spun ideologically in a way that garners support and splits the opposition – thus creating the political el dorado of Rove’s ‘permanent majority’. It provided lucrative contracts to the military-industrial complex. It gave the pro-Republican officer corps a prestige boost and something to put on their resumes. It appealed to liberal interventionists like Thomas Friedman, nauseating moralists like you, and salivating imperialists like Bill Kristol. Throw in an arrogant, ignorant president with a messianic complex and a chip on his shoulder, a subservient, politicized mass media, an incompetent opposition, and a supremely ignorant, panicked, and fearful citizenry and the question inverts itself. Under these conditions, how could we NOT go to war against Iraq in 2003?

The rest, as they say, is history.