under saddam hussein, iraqi oil was traded in euro dollars. what's the official international reserve currency around the globe? the "fiat" american dollar. you can't manage a global empire if the other players in the game don't want to use your money.
american hegemony can only be maintained if the oil in the fields of irag is traded for us dollars, not euros. you can't play "dollar diplomacy" in a world moving more and more toward a gold backed currency exchange. guess who else is trading their oil for euros and no longer using the us dollar? iran. big surprise, huh?
someone once said, and i'm paraphrasing, if the american people understood how the money system worked in this country there would be a revolution the next day.
but then again, you don't tell the american people that you're invading iraq because they don't want to play the game with the us dollar any longer. it then becomes necessary to invent an enemy and stage an event to get the sheep to back the game plan. they were thinking the same thing back in 1962 with Cuba and the northwoods document, albeit for different reasons.
weapons of mass destruction is a much more palatable justification for going to war. the american people know so little about how international finance functions that they would never be pushed into a war simply because some other country refused to trade their most valuable commodity for us dollars. add to that the fact that we had sold WMD's to saddam in years past, at least we had a chance of finding some of them.
to even sell them on the WMD they still required some motivational pretext before they could feel good about sending their loved ones off to some war in the mideast. 9-11 worked.
it's not the first time the american people have been fooled into trading blood for money and it won't be the last, even if they never wind up with any of the money. the love of money, after all, IS the ROOT of all EVIL.
either you sell your oil in exchange for the globally accepted international currency (us dollar) or we're going to come into your country and kick your ass. not a very "diplomatic" way of expressing it but that's as simple as it gets. that's our current foreign monetary policy in a nutshell.