While I'll give them credit for having more creative placards, the hazy assertions of the "Blood for Oil" crowd that the president was somehow in it for the oil money since he came from an oil-rich family never made any sense to me. The Bushes didn't plunder Kuwait's oil after the US occupied that country a decade ago. There are hundreds of easier ways to expand George Sr.'s oil empire than a grueling, two-year battle to obtain the presidency by his son in order to go after Iraq's oil. The presidency and its legacy are too priceless for an already wealthy president and his family to throw away over oil money.
While the war has obviously enhanced Bush's popularity -- as wars always do for sitting presidents -- that couldn't have been Team Bush's main purpose, either. They knowingly launched the war too late to benefit them in the mid-term congressional and gubernatorial elections and too early to help Bush's second run for the presidency. Bush didn't need the war to boost his popularity; he was doing just fine without it, and in fact risked his early popularity on a war that diplomatically or militarily could have easily blown up in his face.
But this war obviously wasn't fought for the purposes Bush stated, either. Sure, Iraq has had some tenuous connections to terrorist organizations, but so have most Middle Eastern countries that had zero involvement in September 11. The weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to justify this war haven't been found, and I doubt they will be, barring the sort of decades-old chemical weapons you could probably buy on the American black market if you had enough money. Even conservatives are shying away from their weapons-of-mass -destruction battle cry of just a few months ago.
So what was the point? I think this war had a lot more to do with where Iraq is located than what it exports. If you want to hunker down and babysit the Middle East, Iraq is the ideal piece of real estate from which to do it. Because we already control Afghanistan, our domination of Iraq now means we control two of Iran's four borders. Since Iran's other two borders are mostly coastline, and we have near dominance at sea, the US virtually has Iran surrounded. Through Iraq, we now control Syria's largest land border, and their other border will be a cakewalk to police because it fronts on the Mediterranean Sea.
Through our control of Iraq, and our air bases in Oman, Kuwait and Qatar, we've virtually surrounded Saudi Arabia, the main funder of terrorism and exporter of terrorists. And that, I believe, is what we wanted from this war.
When we invaded Iraq, US leverage in the Middle East was slipping fast -- so fast, in fact, that we were reduced to playing diplomatic hopscotch with Turkey in order to find somewhere to park our military equipment because the Saudi bases US taxpayers built were no longer available to us.
The pressure by radical Saudi Muslims on the more moderate, US-friendly Saudi monarchy to eject the American military from its Saudi air bases had reached the boiling point. Though the official purpose of the bases was supposedly to keep Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia, American military presence at the bases became one of the main impediments to those who have long been seeking to overthrow the teetering Saudi monarchy. If they succeeded, world oil markets would be thrown into chaos. On the other hand, if we invaded Saudi Arabia, again, world oil markets, and thus our own economy, would be thrown into chaos. With their oil fortune, no one is in a better position to understand the implications of this, or to suffer from it, than the Bushes. What makes this issue so gray is that the world would be suffering along with them.
This is why US officials won't put a target date on their exit from Iraq or the end of their use of Iraq's air bases. And it's why vacating the Saudi bases was one of the first things the US did in the aftermath of the war. The message to the Middle East is clear: the US has hunkered down for the duration and justice will be swift and merciless.
Now imagine explaining the above to the American people. "Uh, yeah, see, we're gonna fight terrorism and shore up world oil markets by acquiring a centrally located Middle Eastern country of our choosing through brute force and superior firepower. But only a few thousand people will die in the process, so go USA!
Any takers? There wouldn't have been.