[Binkie]

Rizash,
there were actually a few reasons for the invasion of Kuwait and indeed one of them had to do with oil. But it was not about Iraq stealing Kuwait's oil, but rather the reverse. The Ba'athists were accusing Kuwait at the time of slant drilling, or drilling at an angle beneath the surface in order to cross the border and strike/steal Iraq's underground oil. That just aided in their decision to overrun Kuwait, since one of the main reasons was because of the debt that Iraq owed to Kuwait from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. To fight a war that carried on for some 8 years, Saddam's government ended up borrowing billions on top of billions of dollars from countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

When it came time to pay the bills in the 1990s, Iraq was struggling like hell to do so. Add to this other issues, such as the fact that Kuwait was originally partitioned from Iraq by the British in the early 1900s - afterwhich Iraq refused to recognize Kuwait, and you can see there were many ideological and economic reasons for the invasion. The forgiving of debt was the foremost economic reason. Taking over oil fields for economic purposes wasn't thrown into the spotlight until the Ba'athist regime began to look to Saudi Arabia's northern fields, which were EXTREMELY lucrative. They'd use the "no clear border" card in order to drive their military occupation on south from Kuwait, though that was promptly countered when they ran into the UN Coalition.