krispos42,
Your blood for oil meme is factually wrong on all counts:
#1 You claim the war was about oil. No, it wasn’t. UN Security Council Resolution 1441 (passing on a vote of 15-0) states the reasons quite clearly. Saddam’s regime was in material violation of previous UN resolutions designed to prevent further military aggression against his neighbors. The only mention oil gets in the resolution was to note that Saddam was bypassing UN restrictions designed to provide “food for oil.”
#2 You say that Iraq had no army. Wrong again. By 1990, Saddam had grown his army to 900,000 strong. It was rated the 4th largest in the world. Casualties for his army during Gulf War One were estimated as high as 100,000. Yet the core of his army, The Republican Guard, escaped the carnage intact.
#3 You claim Iraq was not pumping any oil. Not true. Saddam avoided sanctions by manipulating the UN’s oil for food program into his own pockets. While the Iraqi people suffered, Saddam continued to spend billions on monuments to himself. By 2003, he had over a hundred presidential palaces each costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
#4 & #5 You say that the war was started to benefit the Royal House of Saud. Your claim rests on the belief that US intelligence had the foresight to see that a war next door would draw in Saudi fundamentalist jihadis. In fact, this was manifestly an intelligence failure on our part. Failure to predict exactly this possiblity forced us into the quagmire of an urban guerilla war. As for Saudi domestic concerns, you are misinformed. Generous government benefits ensure that Saudis don’t need to work. In fact, the Saudi economy supports some five million guest workers. The problem with the Saudi education system is that it produces students with useless degrees in subjects like Islamic jurisprudence rather than technology.
BTW, I love the reference to “Cheney’s super-secret energy meeting.” If it was so super-secret, how do YOU know about it?
Your thesis stands refuted, sir.
