...There is no need to invade countries in order to get oil from them. There could, however, be a requirement for large, permanent American military bases somewhere in the Gulf if the goal was to be able to stop oil from the region from reaching some other country. Which country?

The only challenger to America's status as sole superpower is China, and the Bush administration has spent the last seven years in tireless pursuit of alliances or less formal military arrangements with countries all around China's borders. ("Containment," they call it.) China is heavily dependent on imported oil, and the bulk of its imports come from the Gulf. An American hand on China's oil tap could be a major strategic asset.


Maybe that's what Iraq was about.

Even this explanation doesn't make complete sense. The U.S. Navy owns half the major warships on the planet and is perfectly capable of starving China of oil without any land bases in the Gulf. On the other hand, strategy is rarely fully rational and the lavish funding of the Pentagon does encourage it to go in for belt-and-suspenders solutions. (Consider the famous "triad" of long-range bombers, ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles, all designed to deliver the same nuclear weapons on the same targets.)