> > If we went into this war with a goal (oil or whatever), that doesn't
mean that we must have achieved that goal.
>
> I'm pretty sure we know where to find the oil in Iraq. It's not a goal
> we
could realistically fail at if we actually tried. Your comparison between finding oil in Iraq and finding one dude in Afghanistan - one dude, by the way, who is actively attempting NOT to be found, something oil doesn't tend to do - isn't really viable. If you're NOT saying either that the United States doesn't know how to find oil fields or doesn't know how to operate drilling equipment, then I'm not really sure how we could have "failed" to get oil if that's what we were after.


I don't have the time to look into this in depth at the moment (I'm on a work break), but a quick search turned this up:


But it has proved difficult to get Iraq's production up to its prewar levels of about 2.5-3.0 million barrels per day. Iraq's oil-field workers can't ramp up production quickly when electricity facilities are repeatedly sabotaged and the trucks that get them to work and the computers they need at the office are stolen. The Pentagon, which says that security is its top priority, now plans to reconstitute Iraq's special "oil police," and end reliance on the easily sabotaged electric grid by installing on-site generators at refineries and other key installations. That will take time.

[...]

For a while there was talk of privatizing the industry, perhaps after breaking the state-owned company into several competing enterprises. But the problem of establishing security is now absorbing so much of the coalition's energy that all such ideas are on hold.

(from
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/955afmqa.asp)


(This article isn't arguing that we started the war for the sake of oil -- rather, it seems to suggest we're leaving it all in Iraqi hands -- but I think that the comments above are nevertheless relevant.)

I doubt that sabotage and stolen equipment, for instance, entered into the calculations of people who were thinking about how to deal with Iraqi oil facilities.

> > ...except for that bit where we were initially going in because
> > "Saddam
had WMDs." As I recall things, freedom for the Iraqi people became a major objective only after a few months had gone by without our finding any weapons.
>
> You recall rather badly. The name of the operation before it even
> began
was "Operation Iraqi Liberation," changed to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" later on (probably because, frankly, it just sounds better).

Again, I'm on a work break so I don't have time to check this out thoroughly (will try to remember to do so when I get home), but my memories of the coverage of the debate about whether to go to war or not are almost entirely of people talking about WMDs and of those silly satellite pictures that showed supposed weapons factories. Freeing the Iraqi people took a backseat to our reaction to the "threat" that Hussein was supposedly presenting. I'm willing to admit that my memory is incorrect once I see a source that contradicts it, but again I don't have the time to search for sources now and so I'm going on what I remember for the moment.



My definition of a good person is someone who: a) takes care to behave in an ethical manner; b) deeply and sincerely cares about others -- not in a friends-and-family sense, but in a rest-of-humanity sense; c) consistently acts in ways that improve others' lives but do not directly benefit the person him or herself in any substantial way; and d) does not resort to violence unless given absolutely no other option (so achieving c) by killing off everyone who might harm someone else is not being a good person ;) ).


~Chrysanthemum~