> > If this whole war is just for oil, where is all the oil?
>
> If we went into this war with a goal (oil or whatever), that doesn't mean that we must have achieved that goal.

I'm pretty sure we know where to find the oil in Iraq. It's not a goal we could realistically fail at if we actually tried. Your comparison between finding oil in Iraq and finding one dude in Afghanistan - one dude, by the way, who is actively attempting NOT to be found, something oil doesn't tend to do - isn't really viable. If you're NOT saying either that the United States doesn't know how to find oil fields or doesn't know how to operate drilling equipment, then I'm not really sure how we could have "failed" to get oil if that's what we were after.

> We went into Afghanistan to find bin Laden, and we still haven't caught up with him, have we?

Err, no, that's not really why we went into Afghanistan. Finding Bin Laden himself was a secondary goal. The primary goal was to remove from power a despotic government that was harbouring terrorist groups that presented a danger to the United States, and thereby to break a major terrorist power base. This was definitely successful. We didn't find Bin Laden himself, but we sure did find and neutralise in some fashion (be it kill or capture) quite a lot of important Al'Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

> And the third theory is more or less what I think. You can call it an assumption, though I think that "assumption" connotes believing something without doing some thinking about it first, and I've definitely thought about this quite a bit.

No, assumption means nothing of the kind. To quote the fourth definition from dictionary.com: "something taken for granted or accepted as true without proof; a supposition." To wit, how much thinking you've done about it is irrelevant. What matters is the amount of evidence you have. You've made a lot of assumptions based upon your ideas of human nature and what you figure the president is like, and drawn a very broad conclusion from them.

> > The theory that the United States went into Iraq to liberate it from a dictator and build a better society and a better life for the Iraqi people is the only one that fits the facts.
>
> ...except for that bit where we were initially going in because "Saddam had WMDs." As I recall things, freedom for the Iraqi people became a major objective only after a few months had gone by without our finding any weapons.

You recall rather badly. The name of the operation before it even began was "Operation Iraqi Liberation," changed to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" later on (probably because, frankly, it just sounds better).

> Definitely cynical, yes. Can you convince me that the people at the head of our current administration are good people?

That depends on many factors, not least among which is your definition of "good people." If you'll care to provide that, I can give you a better answer.