We are in Iraq because George W. Bush decided long before he was elected that he wanted us to be there for the benefit of oil companies and other corporations.
I don’t believe that. I think he is really trying to fix that part of the world and bring it into the 21st century. He knows that the US needs allies all around the world and especially in the middle east if we are to have any hope against the extremism that is steadily gaining ground over there because of all of the corrupt governments in the region.
Unfortunately, since it doesn’t look likely that our dream government is going to arise there, we’re going with the classic “divide and conquer” strategy out of the British colonial playbook. That will at least prevent them from being any kind of threat to the US (and our corporations, of course). Bush and Cheney simply overreached. Like Dr. Bovary’s club foot operation in that famous book by Flaubert, they tried to make a bad but stable situation better and ended up making it unstable and worse. I think it was simple hubris and arrogance, not greed that drove their decisions.
