This is either the most naive or disingenuous rationalization of the war I've seen in a long time.
While the "no war for oil" message was certainly out there, this was a dumbed down talking point for the young activists without a cause sector. I don't believe for an instant that Bush sought to profit from the war. The man is an idiot. With the exception of his ownership stake in the Texas Rangers (and he had no management control in the team), none of his private sector enterprises EVER profited. As a businessman and entrepreneur he was a three time loser. It was Dick Chenny (and Donald Rumsfield) who were evil (and did profit from the war). But you can't deny the connections between the Whitehouse and the oil industry. Do you think Chevron Texaco named an oil tanker the "Condoleeza" just because they liked the name? Policy usually follows money in Washington and there was a lot of oil money that benefited from, at least temporarily, constraining the supply of oil out of Iraq.
30 Million people in danger is a wild exaggeration. The population of Iraq pre-war was approximately 25 million. The biggest threat to most of the population was the impact of on going sanctions - which did not affect the Sunni minority, but disproportionately weighed on the Shia and Kurdish majority. France and Germany favored loosening sanctions for humanitarian reason, and as a result were labelled as terrorist lovers or opportunists hoping to capitalize on economic opportunities in Iraq.
Breaking down this 25 million a bit further, 35% of these were Sunnis who largely benefited from the Saddam Hussein regime. Another 17% of the population were Kurds who lived in the northern provinces which, while part of Iraq, were not under the control of Bahgdad. Certainly some portion of the Shia majority, (probably 15 million strong including the Kurds) had reason to fear Saddam Hussein. The Shia tribes in the South faced savage retribution as a result of them rising up against Hussein, with American encouragement, following the Gulf War. The Kurds had been subject to persecution and were waging a resistance in the North. I don't want to under estimate what a bastard Saddam Hussein was, but on the scale of other regimes in the last 30 or 40 years which have conducted genocidal campaigns against their own populations (and in many case operated with US ambivalence or support), Hussein was a small time thug. Yes he gassed a few thousand Kurds, killed thousands more in counter insurgency campaigns and probably tortured and imprisoned several thousand more, but in Guatemala alone it is estimated that Government death squads murdered some 200,000 civilians out of a population that at the time was between 6M and 10M. Yet US support for the Guatemalan military regime never wavered. And then there is Indonesia where the US Embassy in Jakarta provided Suharno with small arms, communications equipment, CIA advisors and lists of "communist sympathizers" - whom all ended up dead, some 500,000 of them. So let's not pretend that the US has EVER cared about how brutal a regime is. Our government only cares when it has an impact on US economic or political interests.
To your third point - no nation gets to unilaterally interpret and enforce compliance with UN Security Council resolutions. The US is in violation of scores of UN resolutions and several UNSC resolutions. Collin Powell made his case that Iraq was in material breach of UNSC resolution 1441 (among others) and based on this the US, with the support of only the UK, Spain and Bulgaria, authorized itself to enforce the UN resolutions. The fact remains that Hans Blix and Mohamed Elbaradei reported to the UNSC, basically that there was no solid evidence of active WMD programs and that Iraq was complying in fact, but not in spirit. For example, there were a number of scientists that refused to be interviewed. It can be inferred that this was under threat from Hussein, however the UN or even the US can not force an individual in a soverign nation to be interviewed by weapons or nuclear inspectors. However the majority of the UNSC were in favor of continued inspections. Even lapdogs like Mexico didn't support it.
The term WMD is only vague to those who choose to make it vague or try to make chemical weapons factories out of weather balloon trailers. The terms of what weapons systems and components were banned under the UN resolutions of the 1990's were pretty well laid out. This "well never find the smoking gun ... I guess we'll never know ..." talking point is kind of like O.J. Simpson searching for Nicole's real killer on ever golf course in America. It makes no sense that Saddam Hussein, the Sunni leader of Iraq,would smuggle his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons out of the country to a fierce regional rival - Bashar al-Assad, the Shia leader of Syria.
If all you can point to are old training manuals, empty shells, aluminum tubes and meteorological trailers, it's pretty pathetic. The war was unjustified. The domestic opposition was meek. Congress and the Courts rolled over. Individuals within the administration who had reservations about the war (Clarke, Palme, etc.) were vilified and even Colin Powell checked his integrity at the door and got in line while the press led the cheering section. The Iraq war was a failure of all of the checks and balances of a democracy.
