Informed? We can all google articles:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...aWwNQD9321MRO0

What do you want to bet that BP, and Exxon Mobil get their contracts as well?

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Obviously, you googled one that was old news.

See some of us follow the daily news,not just grasp specific items that help the cause,regardless of relevancy.

The fact is you were uninformed here.The contract you alluded to originally were service contract,small change in the world of oil.These are huge development contracts that the Chinese are chasing.

Im sure 'big oil' will get a slice but you assertions to this point are totally false (wrong).

Good night mate.

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Oil companies will benifit.

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I'll make sure I quit my full-time job and drop out of school to keep up with all of the happenings in the big oil industry, minute-by-minute. Thanks for the tip, MATE.

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I'm with a number of people here in that it was about a confluence of elements.

Most things the US does are. In order for us to move our might we usually need and a realpolitik reason and a reason we can sell to the populace. I don't consider this a bad thing exactly. If we did a lot without underlying benifits we'd wreck ourselves even worse than we are invading every horrible backwater on the planet. But we'd become a pretty nasty nation if the people didn't demand reasons acceptable to them.

Oil provided the realpolitik reason. Note that it wasn't like we planned to somehow steal the stuff. However Saddam was hostile to the US and if he started regional trouble it could (would?) disrupt the flow. They may have also felt a somewhat pro American democracy could influence or go around OPEC.

For reasons for the people include the WMDs, killing of the Kurds, supporting terrorists, and generally Saddam being a bad man.

However I think it's pretty well agreed on that Bush thought it would be a whole lot easier than it was. That Iraq would put itself together after Saddam. Little did he realize they'd rather kill each other than just enjoy massive oil profits.

i remember reading somewhere that the us needed to control the oil in order to save its economy. apparently selling oil for euros instead of dollars was a huge threat to our countrys stability. im sure you can google iraq oil euros and find something on this subject.

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https://www.voteforchange.com/

"Here is the sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the 531-page memoir of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, that caused so much turbulence in Washington last week: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Here is a prosecutor's brief for the position that "the Iraq War is largely about oil":

The primary evidence indicating that the Bush administration coveted Iraqi oil from the start comes from two diverse but impeccably reliable sources: Paul O'Neill, the Treasury Secretary (2001-2003) under President George W. Bush; and Falah Al Jibury, a well-connected Iraqi-American oil consultant, who had acted as President Ronald Reagan's "back channel" to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88. The secondary evidence is from the material that can be found in such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. According to O'Neill's memoirs, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, written by journalist Ron Suskind and published in 2004, the top item on the agenda of the National Security Council's first meeting after Bush entered the Oval Office was Iraq. That was January 30, 2001, more than seven months before the 9/11 attacks. The next National Security Council (NSC) meeting on February 1st was devoted exclusively to Iraq.

Advocating "going after Saddam" during the January 30 meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, according to O'Neill, "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about." He then discussed post-Saddam Iraq -- the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, and the reconstruction of the country's economy. (Suskind, p. 85)

Among the relevant documents later sent to NSC members, including O'Neill, was one prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It had already mapped Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas, and listed American corporations likely to be interested in participating in Iraq's petroleum industry. Another DIA document in the package, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," listed companies from 30 countries -- France, Germany, Russia, and Britain, among others -- their specialties and bidding histories. The attached maps pinpointed "super-giant oil field," "other oil field," and "earmarked for production sharing," and divided the basically undeveloped but oil-rich southwest of Iraq into nine blocks, indicating promising areas for future exploration. (Suskind., p. 96)

On October 11, 2002 the New York Times reported that the Pentagon already had plans to occupy and control Iraq's oilfields. The next day the Economist described how Americans in the know had dubbed the waterway demarcating the southern borders of Iraq and Iran "Klondike on the Shatt al Arab," while Ahmed Chalabi, head of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress and a neocon favorite, had already delivered this message: "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil -- if he gets to run the show." On October 30, Oil and Gas International revealed that the Bush administration wanted a working group of 12 to 20 people to (a) recommend ways to rehabilitate the Iraqi oil industry "in order to increase oil exports to partially pay for a possible U.S. military occupation government," (b) consider Iraq's continued membership of OPEC, and (c) consider whether to honor contracts Saddam Hussein had granted to non-American oil companies.

By late October 2002, columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times would later reveal, Halliburton, the energy services company previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, had prepared a confidential 500-page document on how to handle Iraq's oil industry after an invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was, commented Dowd, "a plan [Halliburton] wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)." She also pointed out that a Times' request for a copy of the plan evinced a distinct lack of response from the Pentagon.

In public, of course, the Bush administration built its case for an invasion of Iraq without referring to that country's oil or the fact that it had the third largest reserves of petroleum in the world. But what happened out of sight was another matter. At a secret NSC briefing for the President on February 24, 2003, entitled, "Planning for the Iraqi Petroleum Infrastructure," a State Department economist, Pamela Quanrud, told Bush that it would cost $7-8 billion to rebuild the oil infrastructure, if Saddam decided to blow up his country's oil wells, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 2004 book, Plan of Attack (pp. 322-323). Quanrud was evidently a member of the State Department group chaired by Amy Myers Jaffe. When the Anglo-American troops invaded on March 20, 2003, they expected to see oil wells ablaze. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. Being a staunch nationalist, he evidently did not want to go down in history as the man who damaged Iraq's most precious natural resource.

On entering Baghdad on April 9th, the American troops stood by as looters burned and ransacked public buildings, including government ministries -- except for the Oil Ministry, which they guarded diligently. Within the next few days, at a secret meeting in London, the Pentagon's scheme of the sale of all Iraqi oil fields got a go-ahead in principle. The Bush administration's assertions that oil was not a prime reason for invading Iraq did not fool Iraqis though. A July 2003 poll of Baghdad residents -- who represented a quarter of the Iraqi national population -- by the London Spectator showed that while 23% believed the reason for the Anglo-American war on Iraq was "to liberate us from dictatorship," twice as many responded, "to get oil". (Cited in Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, p. 398.)

As Iraq's principal occupier, the Bush White House made no secret of its plans to quickly dismantle that country's strong public sector. When the first American proconsul, retired General Jay Garner, focused on holding local elections rather than privatizing the country's economic structure, he was promptly sacked.
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, much equipment was looted from pipelines, pumping stations, and other oil facilities. By August 2003, four months after American troops entered Baghdad, oil output had only inched up to 1.2 million barrels per day, about two-fifths of the pre-invasion level. The forecasts (or dreams) of American planners' that oil production would jump to 6 million barrels per day by 2010 and easily fund the occupation and reconstruction of the country, were now seen for what they were -- part of the hype disseminated privately by American neocons to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the public. With the insurgency taking off, attacks on oil pipelines and pumping stations averaged two a week during the second half of 2003. The pipeline connecting a major northern oil field near Kirkuk -- with an export capacity of 550,000-700,000 barrels per day -- to the Turkish port of Ceyhan became inoperative. Soon, the only oil being exported was from fields in the less disturbed, predominately Shiite south of Iraq.

In September 2003, President Bush approached Congress for $2.1 billion to safeguard and rehabilitate Iraq's oil facilities. The resulting Task Force Shield project undertook to protect 340 key installations and 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of oil pipeline. It was not until the spring of 2004 that output again reached the pre-war average of 2.5 million barrels per day -- and that did not hold.

Bush Pushes for Iraq's Flawed Draft Hydrocarbon Law

In February 2007, in line with the constitution, the draft hydrocarbon law the Iraqi government presented to parliament kept oil and gas in the state sector. It also stipulated recreating a single Iraqi National Oil Company that would be charged with doling out oil income to the provinces on a per-capita basis. The Bush administration latched onto that provision to hype the 43-article Iraqi bill as a key to reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites -- since the Sunni areas of Iraq lack hydrocarbons -- and so included it (as did Congress) in its list of "benchmarks" the Iraqi government had to meet.

Overlooked by Washington was the way that particular article, after mentioning revenue-sharing, stated that a separate Federal Revenue Law would be necessary to settle the matter of distribution -- the first draft of which was only published four months later in June. Far more than revenue sharing and reconciliation, though, what really interested the Bush White House were the mouthwatering incentives for foreign firms to invest in Iraq's hydrocarbon industry contained in the draft law. They promised to provide ample opportunities to America's Oil Majors to reap handsome profits in an oil-rich Iraq whose vast western desert had yet to be explored fully for hydrocarbons. So Bush pressured the Iraqi government to get the necessary law passed before the parliament's vacation in August -- to no avail.

The Bush administration's failure to achieve its short-term objectives does not detract from the overarching fact -- established by the copious evidence marshaled in this article -- that gaining privileged access to Iraqi oil for American companies was a primary objective of the Pentagon's invasion of Iraq."
http://globalpolicy.org/security/oil...925oilgrab.htm

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"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." - Kurt Vonnegut

Sarah Palin seems to think it was for oil.

The average Alaskan says again we recognize these reserves being ready to be tapped. … We're ready to contribute more to the U.S. in terms of resources that can lead to a safer nation; and I say this while our nation is at war, while we're fighting, in some sense, over energy supplies." - Gov. Palin

We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go. - Gov. Palin

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/31/...a-war-for-oil/

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Sarcasm is just another free service I offer.

You are looking at the war from a hindsight. And yes, in hindsight it does not look very clever if it was about oil.

However, don't forget, Bush thought that the war would be finished within 6 months (even though he was warned it might take alot longer and will take alot more resources). Pre war, the estimated costs where just a fraction of what has been spend.

secondly, the US doesn't sell oil, the oil companies do. And the oil companies do not fund this war. If the US did do this for the oil, cost was of a lesser issue as the war would be financed by the people and the gas prices would have stayed low (if it worked as planned). Call it self subsidizing if you will.

anyway main point is, you can't judge the pretence of the war by the result.