The U.S. didn't even get the oil! The Chinese got the oil. The whole thing was because George W. Bush's heart was bigger than his brain: he thought the U.S. could create a functioning democracy from the Iraqi population.
Iraq's current government is still siginficantly better than Saddam's regime, depsite being currupt and somewhat dysfunctional (and things have improved over the years in case you dig up an article from a decade ago about ISIS).
It's a parliamentary democracy with free elections and independent media. It's also chaotic, corrupt, and violent. It's much worse than Sweden or Switzerland but better than many other Arab countries.
As i mentioned in another post, if you measure success as creating a strong, prosperous, independent, viable democracy - then Iraq was an utter failure and so was Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. Which begs the question why does the US pursue the same failed policies over and over again. It turns out we were asking the wrong questions in 2005. If you measure success from the purview of the Yinon plan to establish Israeli hegemony over the entire middle-east then everything aforementioned - including all the death, terrorism, suffering, sectarian and religious strife, massacres and genocides, refugees crises, the rise of ISIS, the recent Al Qaeeda takeover of Syria - everything, was a resounding success.
The social cultural analysis people really left us hanging when it came to finding out what is it with middle eastern culture that makes it unable to build working states and socities. Anti imperialist and anti colonial babblepprotecting the status quo of a patriarchaical, imperialist and colonisl culture that just gets constantly defeated because its handicapped by itself. Like a doctor declaring your disease a lovely character trait instead of helping. The o so solidaric allies are the worst enemies you can get. Chances are when your ideology is bad at managing economies, it's even worser at managing societies .
Its a special kind of evil to deny billions of people hope and participation in the worlds society so one can get high on ones own ideological supply. Bush at least tried . In this he and whatever the Israelis do to prevent the region blowing itself up is the lesser evil.
> The social cultural analysis people really left us hanging when it came to finding out what is it with middle eastern culture that makes it unable to build working states and socities
Nobody said that. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under Assad were working states and societies. The trouble is with bottom up democracy, and that’s a shortcoming of virtually every non-european society. Singapore for example is wealthy, but is already having trouble after its benevolent quasi-authoritarian ruler died.
> Its a special kind of evil to deny billions of people hope and participation in the worlds society so one can get high on ones own ideological supply
To the contrary, it’s cruel to push democracy on societies that aren’t capable of sustaining them.
Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in '98. Bush took over and then launched a ridiculously false campaign about WMDs stockpiled in Iraq. We never found a single one. It's extraordinarily naive and ignorant of basic facts to think Bush invaded Iraq out of the kindness of his heart and to support a true democracy, especially given Bush signed the extremely undemocratic, unconstitutional Patriot Act domestically right after 911 (a bill Biden claims to have originally written... noticing a pattern?)
Let's back up even further. We were "liberating" Iraq from Saddam's government, right? After we tried teaching him a lesson in the Gulf War?
Except declassified circumstantial evidence suggests that Saddam rose to power after a collaborative period between US and Egyptian intelligence agencies including a failed assassination of Qasim, and that he maintained alleged continued contact with US agencies through the 60's. But at some point the US decided it did not like Hussein's objectives and turned on him just like we'd intervened in Qasim's Iraqi government.
This is literally just US military interventionism and you should not proscribe good intent when history shows us otherwise.
edit : I forgot to mention that as of 2024, the US still controlled all oil revenue transactions in Iraq.
- thecradle.co/articles-id/27007
>George W. Bush's heart was bigger than his brain: he thought the U.S. could create a functioning democracy from the Iraqi population.
George Bush probably knew what he was doing in Iraq because his VP, Dick Cheney could have told him way back in 1994[1] what would happen if we overthrew Saddam :
> "Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
> It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
> The other thing was casualties [...] was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right."
"Spreading freedom and democracy" was just another propaganda spin like the "WMDs". The question still remains, why did America spend thousands of lives (tens of thousands, if one counts contracters, veteran suicides, chronic conditions, etc. ) and 2 trillion dollars and counting to overthrow Saddam. Why did they continue to make the same "mistake" in Syria, Libya, Yemen , Sudan, Somalia and Iran[2] causing millions of deaths, millions of refugees, spreading death and destruction across the entire region. By 2025 the picture has become a lot clearer as only theory continues to stand the test of time - that America invaded and intervened to overthrow and destabilize the entire region to clear a path for Israel to invade and expand into "Greater Israel"[3] and become the regional hegemon. How any of this actually serves America's strategic interest is an untenable case to make at which point one will have to consider the notion that when it comes to Israeli-American relations, the tail wags the dog.
