Inevitably when I do a post like the one below people jump in to assert I'm stupid or naive for suggesting otherwise. The Bush administration is not a monolith, it's made up of a large number of players. More than that, even to the extent that it's about money in broad terms, there's more than just oil. Remember that military industrial complex that dirty fucking hippie Eisenhower warned us about? Bush obviously had messianic delusions about the world being reshaped by the power of his mighty codpiece. And there were crazy people around who I think genuinely believe that Saddam has been behind every negative deed in the world in the past 15 years. Others, I think, simply believe in American hegemony and figured the Middle East was a reasonable place to expand it. Due in part, of course, to the presence of oil.
Absent oil or some other valuable resource that part of the world would be much less interesting to us. Oil's a big part of this story, but it isn't the only piece and even if one doesn't grant any genuinely positive motivations to those who brought us his disaster, there are still plenty of malevolent ones in addition to oil. Sure it's about oil, but it isn't the only thing going on here.
