My guess remains OIL, with side-benefits like
- making MIGHT even more apparent to anyone who harbours strange ideas to the contrary
- trying out new weapons in actual field situations
- making other nations a little more compliant to U.S. wishes
- permitting exit from Saudi Arabia, which has all kinds of side benefits itself
- others?... I'm sure there are many.


>That is more or less the way I see it, too. Getting rid of a dictator is a pleasant side-effect, but for the U.S., it definitely looks more like an excuse, than anything else.
>
>But what is totally unclear to me is, what might be the real reasons for the war. Different reasons have been proposed, including a quest for power, for petroleum, and a war against the Euro (apparently Iraq had started to make transactions in Euros instead of US$), religious prejudice. But it is hard to tell which is the real reasoning behind the war.
>
>>Here's what it all boils down to...
>>
>>The U.S. and the U.K. insisted to the rest of the world that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that posed an immediate threat to the security of the free world AND that Iraq was in league with Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups and so posed a clear and present danger to freedom-loving people throughout the world.
>> ...