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As time goes on and the war drags out, people have forgotten why the US is at war at all, and have began concerning themselves with when the war is going to end, the casualties, how well things are going, etc. It is fine to want to know about all these things, and to try and find out about them, but it is important to remember the reasoning for going to war in the first place, and to look at other possibilities for why the US may have gon ein.

The three major reaons given for why the US went to war were that, first and foremost, Iraq had illegally obtained weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was a brutal dictator, and Iraq had connections to terrorism (implying and sometimes outright stating that Iraq was connected to 9/11).

Unfortunately, Weapons of Mass destruction were never found. Several excuses were made, some theorized that the weapons were taken out of the country or hidden under the sand, but in the end the Bush administration just came out and said it - the weapons are not there. Members of the CIA would later come out and say that there was never enough evidence about the weapons to justify going to war.

One point that the Bush administration may have been correct about is that the Saddam was a brutal dictator. He killed thousands of his own people (for siding with Iran during Iraq's war against them and for uprising after the Gulf War) as well as having millions die due to his war with Iran (backed by the US) and hundreds of thousands more during the Gulf War (against coalition troops). He would often institute Muslim law into the laws of his country, including death for sodomy and prostitution. He did however play a major part in building the infrastructure of Iraq and help fight illiteracy throughout the land. Although oppressive, he may not quite have been the monster the US made him out to be. He did use questionable tactics by killing certain political figures who questioned him, one story says he asked for advice to ease the tensions from the war with Kuwait and an adviser said he should step down temporarily to encourage negotiations - that man's cut up body was sent to his family the next day.

It is now more or less accepted that Iraq has no connections to 9/11 or terrorism prior to the US invasion. There has been mention of Saddam paying the families of certain suicide bombers, but none that were connected to 9/11 and not mention of where these suicide bombers struck has been made. The strongest connection are the terrorists that are now there, attracted by the US occupation, that probably have come largely from other countries or became terrorists due to US occupation.

So why did the US go into Iraq - probably not for the reasons that were given. Fahrenheit 9/11 gives the idea that it was motivated by money and a connection to the Saudi's (or maybe that is why we have not caught Bin Laden). Other theories involve the influence of the PNAC (Project for the New American Century), of which many members of Bush's cabinet are a member of, and some other big names (like Bush's brother Jeb). Many of the actions taken by Bush administration can be linked to a document put out by the PNAC in 2000, including defending the homeland and using it to have multiple wars to which the US was to win decisively. There's always the theory that the war was about oil, as oil is becoming more scarce and to maintain the US we will need cheap sources of oil in the coming decades, plus it would provide huge profits for US oil companies (the fields were privatized - they were previously socialized - and sold after the Iraq invasion).

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