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A taboo? Maybe I was (un?)fortunate to be on a college campus during the launch of the second Iraq War, but the "war for oil" commonplace was the dominant narrative. Anyone offering an alternative hypothesis besides that, or GW Bush finishing his father's legacy from 1991 was practically laughed at.

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True, but that’s on the bubble of a college campus. In the media and in non-college circles it was close to heresy to criticize the war during the first few years. Much more so to say it was a profit-driven sham.

Not to say no one was speaking out about it, but the vastly dominant narrative was to support the war effort and ignore the corruption.

I strongly believe it was a combination of bush finishing his daddy's legacy + Hussein playing into the narrative to try to gain power and attention.Adam curtis' hypernormalization BBC documentary is a very good intro to the topic: it was very eye opening, I had no idea that (according to many western intelligence outfits) almost certainly Qaddafi was NOT responsible for pan an lockerbie. Why he didn't deny it and why the intelligence agencies didn't bother going after the truth is answered by curtis' thesis.

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