Reply #10: One big one:

[sofa king]

Money.

Part of the reason why oil was so cheap in the 1990s was because Saddam Hussein was dumping huge amounts of it onto the black market, with President Clinton apparently turning a blind eye to the practice while the Saudis cried.

When the candidate from Saudi Arabia stole the White House, one of the first things they discussed was how to take out Saddam Hussein. At least, that's what we can now guess from what we know of Cheney's secret energy policy meetings in 2001.

So while your point about parking a quarter of a million troops on top of the world's second-largest oil reserves is valid, there is an important second part to that statement: parking on the reserves and preventing those reserves from being extracted, thus driving the price of oil through the roof and delivering windfall profits to the oil companies. They've effectively advanced the onset of peak oil by a decade.

Still another subset of the money question is the massive war profiteering which has been enjoyed by American corporations thanks to the invasion of Iraq. Halliburton spun off KBR and moved its headquarters to Dubai for a good reason, and that reason is that come 2009 a guy named Stuart Bowen is going to be fired as Inspector General in Iraq and soon thereafter Halliburton's board of directors are going to be wanted men.

But by then the profits and the perpetrators will all be out of the country.