Does that not lead you to question your assumption that the war was "for oil in Iraq"?
Before Bush was elected, there was a lot of lobbying by Chalabi, Wolfowitz and others (see Richard Bonin's fantastic Arrows of the Night) to create the (false) impression that Saddam was an unstable warmonger who was amassing WMDs and preparing another invasion.
The fear was that Saddam -- incredible as it sounds today, knowing what we now know -- was capable of taking Kuwait again and possibly even Saudi Arabia, which would have been disastrous for the US.
The evidence uncovered after the invasion shows that Saddam's Iraq had been bled dry by sanctions, and that Saddam's frustrations with forced weapons inspectors had been genuine (the chemical weapons were destroyed long ago) all along; by the late 90s, Iraq was toothless. Saddam could not have staged another war if he wanted to.
Clinton didn't oust Saddam's precisely because it wasn't necessary; Iraq provided stability in an historically unstable region. The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information. The Pentagon (I think it was) had run simulated war games, every one of which predicted an outcome very much like today.
Saddam was a dictator who massacred his own people, but his regime resulted in far fewer casualties than the invasion and subsequent chaos.
> The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information.
The CIA believed Saddam had WMD, and he certainly behaved like he did. The State Dept. isn't relevant in this context - they're not an intelligence organization. Given that he'd used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and his own people it was a pretty good bet he would use them in the future.
The US and the UK ignored the utter lack of evidence and preemptive decided he had WMDs anyway, with zero solid evidence to back those claims up; the two main "defectors" who described mobile chemical weapons labs were provided by Chalabi, and nobody did the due diligence to check if their claims were enough grounds for an invasion.
Not to mention the other purported reason for going to war, the Al Qaeda connection. As a secular state who clamped down on religious extremism, Iraqi support for Al Qaeda was nonsensical. Iraq sought to cooperate with the US against Al Qaeda, but were rebuffed.
None of this is true, and even if it were true we could not have known it to be true, particularly based on they way Saddam was acting.
Absence of evidence is not evidence.
Weapons inspectors found nothing before the invasion, and nothing afterwards. Also, the CIA had very little inside intelligence about the regime (so called defectors turned out to have false information) on which to base decisions on.
If you can't know, don't invade.