http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR2007042700550.html?nav=most_emailed - Tenet Details Efforts to Justify Invading Iraq

<quote>
White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet.
</quote>

Greg Palast (http://www.gregpalast.com/the-best-thing-in-the-world-for-big-oil/) claims Iraq was about hiking oil prices and the early Iraqi agenda supports that.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

signed by Armitage, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz

I'm surprised they referred to Clinton as "Honorable".

Ya gotta wonder if there's any politician on either side of the aisle who really merits that description.

Not to forget the Iraq Liberation Act, which Clinton signed in October 1998. 

During that month Clinton and the Dems passed GEAR-UP to help perpare high-poverty middle schools for college, 1.2 billion to hire 100,000 teachers, $846 million for before and after school learning centers, reauthorized the head start program, and established the Individual Development Account Demonstration Program to encourage low-income families to save for a first home, post-secondary education or to start a new business and helped negotiate a signed agreement between Netanyahu and  Arafat.

During that month Gingrich orchestrated the GOP's multimillion dollar ad campaign invoking President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a party line vote in House Judiciary Committee opened an impeachment inquiry and the Iraq Liberation Act was jammed down Clinton's throat.

One of my friends' theories is that it all stemmed from a disagreement between Cheney and Saddam over an oil pipeline.

It certainly seems to fit the facts (Cheney was obsessed with invading Iraq from the very beginning, whereas Bush was somewhat 'meh' about the whole thing).

>Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197

Hiking oil prices, maintaining oil prices in dollarus, gaining de facto control of oilfields ...