Oil-for-food was aimed at allowing payment for humanitarian resources (you know, food) in oil, so Iraq could keep feeding people without receiving money for their oil, since money could (more easily) be used to buy stuff other than food, like tanks and AA systems and aircraft to rebuild their their quite-strong-before-gulf-war-I military, or to do other things we didn't want them to. Did we screw them on the "price" they got for it and so kinda steal the oil? I mean, yeah, probably, but I very much doubt it was any kind of major motivation for anything the "West" did.
Iraq War II was bullshit and probably a strategic mis-step, and I'm proud to have been among the minority (in the US, anyway) who opposed it and the even smaller minority who actually got out and protested against it, but we didn't need their oil. The US has plenty. We only really care about foreign oil supplies for market-stabilization reasons—it's not worth the effort and various costs to steal it from other countries by force.
Now, there was a lot of corruption and it sure is weird how a bunch of Bush-admin-connected companies landed so many giant contracts related to the war and it 100% does look like "we should invade Iraq ASAP the first time we have even the flimsiest excuse" was indeed one of those actual-in-fact-real conspiracies (multiple top-level Bush admin folks literally signed their name to such sentiments in the late 90s—I'm not even sure you can properly call it a conspiracy given how out in the open it was) but we didn't attack for the oil.
As or why the ones who pushed the war wanted it, I think there was a selfish motivation given that a lot of them were situated to make money off such a war, but also a genuine desire to improve the US position in a much longer-term realpolitik great powers game. Oil in the near term was a pretty minor concern—to the extent it was really about oil, I'd say future ability to strangle larger opponents by controlling access to oil was what they had in mind. Maybe a bit of a message to OPEC states, too.
The problem is that oil is sold into a global market, so even if a nation produces as much oil as it consumes, if there is a shortage of oil, the global prices go up, and then your own oil prices go up. So your economy can be thrown into a recession and your standard of living will decline due to Iraq's oil being taken out of the world market even if you don't need to import any oil from Iraq.
For this reason, the US sought to control all global oil suppliers, wherever they may be, and whomever they sell oil to. Yes, it's an unsustainable, insane, geopolitical strategy -- but in the heady days of post cold-war hegemony, US foreign policy became controlled by neocon ideologues who thought that absolute control over the middle east was an achievable and moral goal. The result of this policy is millions of dead civilians, functioning secular societies that have been destroyed and handed over to warring religious clans, and global chaos from Libya to Afghanistan.
Iraq War II was bullshit and probably a strategic mis-step, and I'm proud to have been among the minority (in the US, anyway) who opposed it and the even smaller minority who actually got out and protested against it, but we didn't need their oil. The US has plenty. We only really care about foreign oil supplies for market-stabilization reasons—it's not worth the effort and various costs to steal it from other countries by force.
Now, there was a lot of corruption and it sure is weird how a bunch of Bush-admin-connected companies landed so many giant contracts related to the war and it 100% does look like "we should invade Iraq ASAP the first time we have even the flimsiest excuse" was indeed one of those actual-in-fact-real conspiracies (multiple top-level Bush admin folks literally signed their name to such sentiments in the late 90s—I'm not even sure you can properly call it a conspiracy given how out in the open it was) but we didn't attack for the oil.
As or why the ones who pushed the war wanted it, I think there was a selfish motivation given that a lot of them were situated to make money off such a war, but also a genuine desire to improve the US position in a much longer-term realpolitik great powers game. Oil in the near term was a pretty minor concern—to the extent it was really about oil, I'd say future ability to strangle larger opponents by controlling access to oil was what they had in mind. Maybe a bit of a message to OPEC states, too.