But in the minds of the people perpetuating this, oil has nothing to do with this war.
If it were really a couple Exxon bigwigs who were completely to blame for us still being there, it'd be pretty easy to tell them to go screw and end it.
I live next to the nerve center of the military-industrial complex and I get to talk to a lot of military personnel and contractors. I've been here for 21 of the last 22 years so I get to watch general feelings about things like this change.
In the beginning, the grunt's attitude was exactly what you saw on FAUX news - they hate us for our freedoms, the Iraqi people are suffering, we can do good in the world. The idea that nobody reads or understands the constitution isn't old - they were ignoring it 5 years ago, too. Throw in a little "we're fighting over there so we don't have to fight over here", and some good old-fashioned pride (not the good kind), and you've got a recipe for blindly devoted soldiers.
Now when I say "grunt" I'm not really even talking about privates, I'm talking about everyone, up to flag rank, who is career military. Not the people who aren't making the decision to go to war or not go to war... the people to whom it wouldn't even occur that they could doubt what's going on. They don't doubt it because that's their job, and there are enough people who remember what the 70's were like left around to tell the youngins that they need to keep their pride or we'll lose.
That's the way they see things - that there's a job to be done, that we can't doubt it because doubting will make us lose, and additionally, the most important thing - a lot of them have already died, and the number one way to create the ultimate goat screw in the military is to pretend like their deaths meant nothing. That is, after all, a large part of why they're so bitter about Viet Nam even after so many years.
It has little to do with being dangerous to the troops - that's what they signed on for. The problem comes when America universally turns their backs on 4000 dead soldiers and pulls out immediately. They want to finish the job because they have close personal friends who are in the ground right now because of this job.
As usual, when you put all the emotions aside and objectively assess what's going on, you get to our side of things, where you realize that there is no clear objective, that nation building is an economically unviable option and will ultimately fail, and that killing more soldiers isn't going to bring meaning to the deaths of the 4000.
But when you've seen your buddy's head explode, it's kind of hard to think objectively.
