At last count we had been given six different reasons for invading Iraq, some of them false and the rest contradictory. The current favorite -- seeking to change an obnoxious regime -- might carry weight if it was not contrary to international law and if in the past both the United States and Britain had not gone out of their way to support the Iraqi regime when it was far more obnoxious.

Given all this duplicity, the critics assume that a lust to control Iraqi oil must be the main reason. That factor cannot entirely be ruled out. But whether it is dominant is more doubtful.

During the Vietnam War, many on the left mistakenly assumed that the U.S. motive was to control Indochina's resources, until the cost of the war began to exceed any possible value those resources might ever have had. Pumping gas through Afghanistan was supposed to be a motive for the U.S. attack there last year, except that no one wants to build a pipeline in that fractious nation.