OOoOOooh man, I wish I had saved screen shots from an old, conservative leaning fitness message board I used to post on 15 years ago.
I was 17/18 and was just starting to turn against the Iraq war despite what I was raised to believe. I was still very conservative on most issues. I was not sure of myself, so I was being extra careful to give well thought out, respectful arguments. I talked about how much the war cost and how we were boosting anti American sentiment and how Iraq was kind of the wrong country to invade.
The responses I got from the soldiers and other conservatives on that bored were absolutely comical. Tons of absurd, macho bullshit. One soldier mostly just talked about how good a warrior he was because that was a relevant argument I guess. Literally talked about how easily he could snap necks (not as a threat, just general over compensation)..
Well to be honest: what else did you expect from them? We all know today, and knew back then, how they've been lied to. That Saddam Hussein was never an ally of Al-Qaida, and knew on how to keep them down. After he was replaced, this opened the doors for Al-Qaida, before it was a non issue in Iraq, so it was really the USA who opened the door to Iraq for Al-Qaida in the end.
Soldiers need a reason to fight, and to motivate them it had better to be a good one; which reason would motivate you personally more to risk your life,
a) let's chase the dictator of Iraq, Hussein, who supported Al-Qaida, so that they could make their terror act in NYC, or
b) let's invade Iraq, because we do need reliable access to oil to keep our standard of living in the foreseeable future, and we cannot rely on Saudi Arabia any longer?
In my opinion it is a) - and of course the soldiers have been lied to, and exactly told stuff like that, while in reality it was all about the oil, and nothing else.
War is never fought about human rights, on the contrary: as long as dictators abide the USA's bidding, the USA never ever had any qualms to work with them and support them, this includes Saddam Hussein.The whole Western world has no problems of doing much business with China, which is for sure no prime example of human rights either.
Was is always and foremost about getting/securing access to resources, and keeping trade ways safe sometimes, and nothing else.
So of course all soldiers would cling to a), and don't want to hear otherwise, or even admit this, due to obvious reasons.
By the way, yes, probably 2 trillion US dollars or even on costs, but you got it wrong when you think that this money mostly drained away in the Iraq. If so, this would be now a very healthy country, with nice infrastructure, but is it? No. So the vast majority of this money went back in the USA, soldiers, private mercenaries, support companies, weapons/ammunition manufacturers, you get the idea, in short it benefitted the American economy.
