The second Iraq war may not have been STARTED for oil, but it certainly became a huge part of the conflict when it was under way and was definitely a consideration before it started.
A quote from the Chilcot Inquiry - Blair had told the US president, George W Bush, at a meeting mid-invasion on 31 March 2003, that a clearer picture was needed of the shape of a post-Saddam Iraq to “sketch out a political and economic future and dispel the myth that we were out to grab Iraq’s oil”. Yet a civil service briefing note in the same year for Geoff Hoon – then the UK defence secretary – before talks with his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, discusses the need for “Level playing field: big contracts to rebuild Iraq. Putting UK lives on line. Expect level playing field for UK business in oil and other areas.”
UK government officials called in a team from BP for a briefing about the prospects for the
Iraq energy sector on 23 January 2003, two months before the invasion, which ended in May.
I know many people who are appalled at the UK's role in the invasion, Blair has been labelled as a war monger by some.
I'd also like to acknowledge the comments above about what the aims of the war were and why troops stayed afterwards. I agree to some extent and would like to point out that this shows this ISIS issue isn't something that has happened primarily because of Obama, the dominos were already set in motion regardless. Libya and Syria have been the biggest breeding grounds for ISIS I think, so it could be argued that intervention in the region, or lack of intervention in Libya/Syria are big factors. Syria has more or less become a US/RUS proxy war with each backing the other side, so many rebel groups have formed to varying degrees of extremism. It's just so sad that millions of people have been displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, and generations of children face uncertain futures having missed out on education and a safe upbringing.
