My take on the 'America went into Iraq for oil' position:
The oil conspiracy says that for whatever reason, Bush (and any other fellow conspirators) lied about his real reasons for going into Iraq,in order to cover up the fact it was actually for oil. So he gave made-up, untrue or otherwise misleading reasons.
Now, consider a person who agrees with the reasons he gave, but would be opposed to the real (oil-based) reasons. Such a person is a dupe of the conspirators.
All the ordinary people who voted for Bush would be dupes, because none of them would think the oil reason is good or justified.
Also, for the conspiracy to work, it would presumably require the cooperation of many other dupes, such as journalists and political commentators, soldiers, and civil servants.
I'm guessing that these people would be dupes, rather than people in on the conspiracy, because it's in the conspirators' interests to have as many dupes as possible. Every lie the conspirators tell, every secret meeting they hold, every secret decision they make and every secret message they share, could run the risk of the conspiracy being found out and exposed to the public.
Therefore, the more people who believe in the conspiracy and want to help the conspirators (without knowing the true motives), the less the conspirators have to worry about secret planning, and having to hide their real reasons for supporting the plans. The more dupes help the conspirators, the fewer real conspirators are needed, so the secret-keeping is less risky.
So, there are a lot of dupes. But are there any politicians among them?
There aren't any immediate ways of telling. For the conspiracy to work, the conspirators must act exactly as if they were dupes, and any duped politicians would act the same as if they were conspirators (they'd argue for the policy, vote for it, criticise opponents, try to promote it, etc.).
How high are the dupes allowed to rise? For all we know, even some member of the Cabinet might not be in on the conspiracy, and are genuinely motivated by what Bush and the conspirators claim their reasons are. Could Bush himself be a dupe? We wouldn't be able to tell either way, because he would act exactly the same in public in both cases. Could it be that everyone are dupes, and in fact there's no conspiracy at all? It's impossible to tell.
Another thing is: how are conspirators enlisted? Are high-ranking dupes ever allowed to become part of the conspiracy? If so, how can the conspirators be sure that they won't rebel and reveal to the public that there's a conspiracy going on? The promise of riches won't sway everyone. Dupes genuinely believe in the policies and reasons that they've been fed -- most people would be outraged to find out that what they've been working for is a lie, and insulted at the offer of joining this lie. Not to mention they could probably make a fair bit of money selling the story to the paper, and appearing on TV programmes explaining the details of how the conspiracy was planned and so on. All of these reasons -- the money, the popularity, the morality -- might even persuade conspirators who were never dupes to come forth with the truth.
All of this, along with how difficult it would be to keep all the messages, plans, meetings, etc. completely secret, makes it seem unlikely to me that Bush lied and it was actually for oil.
(Incidentally, this is the reason no big conspiracies could work without being discovered quickly.)
This is a really clever article, except I thought it was going to end differently. After,
"Could Bush himself be a dupe? We wouldn't be able to tell either way, because he would act exactly the same in public in both cases. Could it be that everyone are dupes, and in fact there's no conspiracy at all? It's impossible to tell."
If it's impossible to distinguish between two hypothesis, then every piece of evidence that confirms one will confirm the other, so we can't update our beliefs (bayesian) / the hypothesis is unfalsifiable (popperian).
Yes indeed. If it's impossible to distinguish between the two, and then you say "and therefore all evidence supports my side", that's meaningless because it supports the other side too.
So we have to use other reasons to work out which side is true, like the ones I give in this article, and we can't use that as an argument in favour of our side (which conspiracy theorists often do).
I think pretty much the only evidence we can use is either
1) incentives- did we have a strong incentive to invade for oil? No, it'd be cheaper to buy it.
and
2) is there any evidence of dodgy dealings? e.g. leaked minutes, whatever. To my knowledge, there isn't any, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Yeah, those are other reasons this case doesn't look like a conspiracy. But I think the philosophical arguments are stronger than the evidence.
Even if buying the oil was more expensive, and even if there were dodgy dealings, I'd still find it hard to believe there's a conspiracy, because of the reasons in my article above.