[demosthenes the elder]

It is not the oil, and yet it is the oil.
We are dealing with the totality of the oil, the global industrial oil economy, the entire history thereof, and the results of the Cold War cycles of conflict by proxy in an area made important only by the presense of oil.
Think about it: What if we had somehow bypassed the technological and economic need for oil some 100 years ago, before it had been discovered in significant quantity in what was then a poor, barren, sparsely populated, and utterly insignificant armpit of the world? Or, what if there had simply been no oil fields laid down in the carboniferous period in what would become the Middle East?
Think about it.
Uncounted trillions of dollars would not have been injected into those lands. Advanced medicine and technology would not have become available to them. National boundaries would not have been imposed by competing european empires. OPEC would never have happened. The US and USSR would not have sparred over the territory, funding insurgency groups to destabilize things, funding other thugs to be our dogs in the region. The populations would not have exploded. The people would have remained unsophisticated wanderers and herders. Nomads do not have global imperial ambitions.
If not for oil, the Middle East would never have become important enough for us to become in any way involved with it. 9/11 would not have happened. The entire Middle East would be irrelevant today.
I am not expressing this notion as clearly as I would like. Forgive me - long day. But I trust you have grasped the gist: If not for oil, nobody would give a damn about the Middle East.

[SuziQ]

You make a good point about the fact that if it were not for the oil there, not many people would give a flying fig for the Middle East. But as for this particular conflict, I don't think it has anything to do with Pres. Bush's desire to take over the Middle East Oil fields or enrich his oil company buddies. The oil companies, I'm sure, would prefer to avoid conflict because that is disruptive to discovery and delivery. He believes because of certain intelligence information that Saddam Hussein is a threat not only to his neighbors, but to us because of the easy delivery of death by proxy, a la 9/11.