Wait a minute, those all sound like much better justifications of the war than what we got.that we wanted to secure Iraq's oil supply and free more of it up to the open market to make sure our gas bills are cheaper, and also establish a stronger military presence in the region to interact with Iran if need be. When you put it like that, it's a lot harder to justify spending trillions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
More rational, but harder to rally people around. If you tell people that they've been hurt and need to retaliate, that's very different from, "Let's beat up this country for money!"
I actually supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Taliban doesn't want to hand over Bin Laden? Alright, fuck you and get ready for us to come in and take him (although even here, I've read some damning claims that we could have gotten them to hand him over...not sure completely though, this is still a little murky to me). I'm not a pacifist, and I'm all for going after people and orgs that have attacked and declared war on us (where it makes sense to do so). But the Iraq war had nothing to do with 911 and zero to do with terrorists...except for all of the terrorists we created there and invited there, where it is now a fully operational arena for some of the worst groups on the globe which it was not under Saddam's authoritarian fist. God the Bush administration was a complete foreign policy clusterfuck.
Right! But they were rallied around retaliatory war. Not cold-blooded "this makes economic sense" war.