No, but you should have more specifics than just stuff like "come on! don't be naive! of course the war was for oil!" Iraq had oil, the US invaded, therefore the war was for oil.JimC wrote:
You really think such clear motivations are written on planning documents? I'd call that naive, except I know it's just more American defensiveness...
The US didn't need to go to war to get what it got after the invasion. In fact, the US could have gotten a lot more from Hussein directly, in exchange for lifting the sanctions on Iraq, than it has gotten from the war.
If anything can be said to be a debacle, it's the LACK of benefit received by the US and US interests from the war. Not only was the war a foreign policy blunder, and a huge setback to the overall global strategy against rogue nations and international terrorist organizations, but also it was a pure gift to Russia and China. Russia and China, of course, were violating the sanctions regime as much as they could back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, however, they have nothing stopping them from drilling like mad, and that's what they're doing. The US companies have not been nearly as fortunate. In other words, if we were stealing the oil, we really suck at it. We basically blew open the safe, and let a bunch of other guys take the loot.
