We should all thank former Bush administration adviser Meghan O’Sullivan for the honesty in her Sept. 11 Outlook commentary, “We shouldn’t pull out of Iraq, for their sake and ours,” in which she argued that the “most compelling” reason for maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq is to secure that nation’s oil.

I am among millions of Americans who have argued for years that oil was at the heart of our war with Iraq, even though many of us were labeled conspiracy theorists for doing so — even within this very newspaper. While we Americans may love our oil, the public has never supported the idea that our soldiers should kill and die for it, that we should be invaders and occupiers to secure it and that we should spend hundreds of billions of tax dollars to go after it.

Had this argument been so clearly made at the start of the war, few Americans would have supported the invasion of Iraq. We should now view Ms. O’Sullivan’s honest articulation that this is a war for oil as one of the best reasons yet offered to bring it to an immediate end.