Wars are always about wealth and (secondarily) spreading or maintaining one's culture. Long ago we discovered the massive amounts of money that were to be made in the defense industry and have ridden that horse to the present day. Look at how much the working American pays in taxes and how much of that (isn't it 35-40%-I don't know my figures on this?) gets spent on defense. Throw in the need for humans to spread their beliefs, ways and customs to the "uninformed" of the "rest" of the world and you have the recipe for continuous war of some sort, somewhere. In the current situation, oil is just the gravy and another cog in the "wealth" machine. Plus our (U.S.) culture depends on it so there's lots of interconnectedness going on.

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1983 M-B 240D-Gone too.
1976 M-B 300D-Departed.

"Good" is the worst enemy of "Great".