you wrote: "such as?"
I have no idea...I could theorize, but it would be just that, theory.
The real travesty here is that Joe Citizen really does not know. In a republic, war is carefully debated by free citizens who weigh the arguments pro and con. If war is chosen, everyone knows the reasons, because the grievances of the citizens ARE the underlying motive for the war.
An empire functions in a totally different manner. In an empire, you have a polyglot population presided over by a deracinated, cosmopolitan elite. There is no commonly agreed upon motive for war because there are no commonly agreed upon interests and beliefs.
Thus, war usually results from the arcane manipulations of various influential pressure groups. In this setting, Joe Citizen is unaware why his son is dying and why his house just got blown up. He may have heard the offician line, but he is usually smart enough to realize that the official line is bunk. As to what the real motives are, Joe Citizen can only speculate.
I do not believe that WMD were the real reason for this war. The evidence presented was off-the-cuff and somewhat amateurish. The reality of 6 weeks of occupation is that none have been found. We were told that the country was awash in tons of toxins and gases.
As for the other reasons, they are equally suspect. The connection to Osama was always tenuous at best. The fact that Hussein is a dictator was also somewhat phoney, since this didn't stop us from arming him in the 80's (and it doesn't stop us from allying ourselves with other regimes such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...both of which have more connections to Osama than Iraq did).
So....the bottom line is this: We went to war. I am unsure why. But I do know that the stated reasons are bogus. Past that, you'll have to ask someone who is privy to what is going on behind that imperial curtain.
It's really difficult to believe it was "oil." If it was it would have been far easier to cut a deal with Saddam - like we used to in the old days.
I think that one might argue that neo-cons like Wolfowitz might have had ulterior motives. Plausibly. Maybe. But I find it harder to believe that the likes of Powell and Blair could have been part of the con. More likely they were conned, save for the difficulty that both had plenty of access to the raw data. So you would have to assume that the intelligence agencies were very badly compromised.
If there was an ulterior motive I might speculate on what it was and argue that whether it was ulterior or not it wasn't exactly off the radar scope. There was a fair amount of talk in conservative policy circles about the need for regional transformation. That the status quo of corrupt kleptocracies presiding over stagnant economies run by police states with lots of young, very angry young Muslim men was a recipe for more 9/11s and even worse. Iraq, being at the middle of of the region, provided a perfect place to begin such an experiment, as its fall would provide pressure simultaneously on Syria and Iran to reform while allowing us to pull out our obnoxious presence of troops from Saudi Arabia.
All of which i would agree with but perhaps that would be a more difficult sell than "weapons of mass destruction" and "terror support."
In any case the failure to discover WMD's so far does not mean they were not there. Saddam obviously went to some lengths to hide *something.* So what was it? And what happened to it? And even given the quantities being talked about (30,000 liters, several thousand tons, etc.) are really not so large as they sound. Especially given that these agents can be stored and transported in small amounts. In a country the size of California that might be so difficult if Saddam went to some lengths before the war to hide them, destroy them, or spirit them away to, say, Syria.
Blair seems confident that it will come out soon. Well: we'll know soon enough.