Iraq was an Oil Grab.

The Observer seems to specialise in sententious waffling editorials every Sunday. On the subject of the Iraq War, the editorial today opines,

There was no single reason why Britain and the US went to war in Iraq. The motives that inspired George W Bush and Tony Blair have been variously dissected, analysed and psychoanalysed. It is too early for history to have formed a settled view on the war, but the case that it was a monumental error gets ever more compelling.

There never is exactly just one reason why wars are fought. Yet that Iraq was an oil grab was clear at the time and even more so now. Leading establishment figures have admitted oil as the principle driving force. In 2001 Cheney set up an Energy Task Force to look into Iraq's reserves and got a geologist to work on it.

Iraq was invaded because of geostrategic desperation, the need to control some of the largest reserves in the world after the increasingly unstable Saudi Arabia and hostile Iran. By controlling Iraqi oil , the USA would have increased its hegemonic bargaining power vis a vis a rapidly industrialising and energy hungry China.

That it did not work out that way, which China taking over many of the Iraqi oil concessions as the chaos ensued and the US dollar stopped being the globe's strongest petrocurrency was made worse by the costs of invasion, did not invalidate the fact that the Bush II regime invaded Iraq for oil.

That was inherent in the way that in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Iraq descended into anarchy and the treasures of the museum in Baghdad were looted whilst the Oil Ministry was secured along with the infrastructure. With regard the collapse of civilian infrastructure Donald Rumsfeld callously remarked that "Stuff happens"

Those who routinely denied oil as the key objective are not only deluded but are obfuscating the facts about the West's lethal over reliance upon petroleum in dangerous lands and that really needs discussion if civilisation is to continue. The invasion of Iraq was not a "mistake". It was an intentional resource war.

The Observer then has it that,

Most of the official justifications for war, on grounds of security from terror and weapons of mass destruction, have been discredited.

Well, it's a pity that loopholes in the official version and the spin that was used to justify going in to Iraq was not discredited by newspapers such as The Observer at the time of the invasion as opposed to actually supporting the Iraq War as a "humanitarian intervention". But that would mean doing some journalism of the investigative kind.