Correct, artbrooks, wars usually have multiple causes, and I'm sure this one did. As I said in an earlier post: "That war was fought over the usual grand imperial objectives (resources, land, regional and political control, etc)...not over some nonexistent fear of Iraq's wretchedly puny ability to defend itself with advanced weapons."

There is no moral or legal justification for pre-emptively attacking another country merely because it possesses or is rumoured to possess some kind of weapons. To do so is absolutely illegal aggression, pure and simple.

If you don't get that...just imagine for a moment if some other country...any country...openly attacked your country on that basis, and tell me how you would feel about it....you'd be outraged! And rightly so.

The USA isn't dependent on Iraqi oil, and I'm not suggesting that they are. What I am suggesting is that they want all Middle Eastern oil to be officially marketed in US dollars, not in the Euro. Saddam switched the sales of Iraqi oil to the Euro shortly before the 2003 war. I'm suggesting that it was that move by Saddam which sealed his fate, because it got in the way of American monetary interests. Ultimately, money is THE crucial deciding factor in most weighty political decisions, including the decision to go to war.

Nonetheless, there would have been a host of other contributing reasons for the war, I'm sure, but I doubt that fear of Iraqi WMDs was one of them. I don't think the US administration was one bit scared of Iraqi WMDs...unless they're a lot stupider than I think they are... (always a possibility, I suppose). I don't think they're stupid. I think they're ambitious, ruthless, and bent on winning the game of imperial competition...their main rivals being Russia and China, and perhaps India a bit farther down the road.

If you go back to 1991...then, yes, the USA was afraid of a possible Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia, following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait...but that would no longer have been a factor in 2003. Iraq was tremedously weakened by 2003, quite incapable of being a threat to anyone but their own religious and ethnic splinter groups within the country itself.

Bush was crying "Wolf!" in 2003...but not out of any real threat to anyone by Saddam...he was doing it because the American Empire had decided to add another section to its imperial holdings in the Middle East...under a toothless client government, of course. ;-) That's how it's done these days. First you destroy the existing government by military force and/or by assassination (as in Allende's Chile). Then you set up a farcical appearance of a new democracy by allowing 2 or more new parties to go at it in a voting excercise that is rather like painting whitewash on a tomb and calling it a mansion. All the while, you keep a powerful US military presence on the ground, on the sea, and in the air, to ensure that that it is really YOU who controls that country. That's how empires do it these days. Official colonialism has been replaced by de facto colonialism, masquerading as "liberation" and "democratization".

If anyone else dared to do it, the USA would scream in outrage. But the USA does it, and feels righteous about it...being utterly certain that they are, as it were, the right hand of God, setting the affairs of a suffering humanity in order. ;-)

No one could believe it, except the USA...but empires always believe in their own hype. They have to. It's inherent to their whole sense of identity.