What confuses people like you is that you think selling the oil is the only way the US has to benefit from the war. The US most of all, like all superpowers before it, wants control of the market.
You should leave international politics aside and go back to tech or whatever the hell you do in your daily job.
The US didn't level Iraq in fact. The Iraqis leveled Iraq trying to murder each other in a large civil war that the US tried for years to stop (it could have just left instead). The US lost thousands of soldiers and a trillion dollars stepping in-between those factions. The Sunni and Shia in Iraq have hated each other for hundreds of years and immediately began killing each other after Saddam's Government fell. Saddam's 'solution' for that conflict previously was extreme oppression of the majority Shia. The only rational solution is to split the country into pieces; until then the conflict will continue perpetually.
> has been occupying it for almost 20 years
You're inventing that.
The US isn't occupying Iraq and certainly hasn't occupied it for 20 years. The US has single digit thousands of troops in Iraq in mostly supporting roles, at the invitation of the Iraqi Government. It previously left at the request of the Iraqi Government during the Obama Admin.
Please tell me how the US can occupy Iraq with a few thousand soldiers, when it couldn't control Iraq previously with more than a hundred thousand soldiers.
> you think selling the oil is the only way the US has to benefit from the war. The US most of all, like all superpowers before it, wants control of the market.
The US had dramatically more control of the Iraqi oil market before the war, with the ability to raise or lower output at will, using the aggressive sanction regime that was in place against Saddam Hussein's government. If the US wanted more Iraqi oil on the market, all it had to do is relax sanctions or look the other way as countries cheated on the sanctions.
Now Iraqi oil output is heading to new record highs, with the US having very little control over it. In fact, in your theory the US has an incentive to decimate the Iraqi oil industry rather than see it thrive. The US is the world's largest oil producer and has the most to gain from that. Projections are for US oil production to climb to 15-18 million barrels per day, far beyond Saudi and Russia, over the coming decade. It would be a large benefit to US oil producers - keeping prices up - to not have Iraq producing so much oil over that time.
The post Saddam ten year era in Iraq - the occupation - was about nation building, a foolish exercise of a superpower. The same is true about trying to prop up the Afghanistan Government vs the Taliban (a nearly impossible task). The US has vaporized a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, there is no way that can ever be recouped. The US had prior success with nation building in Europe and Asia and ignorantly believed it could accomplish a positive outcome in the Middle East.
