Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

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1. USA ousts Saddam Hussein, and is obligated to help Iraq transition to a democratic government (because they invasion was done under the pretext of liberating a country from a mad dictator with weapons of mass destruction, instead of the commonly cited argument of securing resources for the American empire).

2. USA backs a candidate and initially gets a government elected that is favorable to the USA. However, these politicians turn out to be kind of scummy and screw up just about everything.

3. Iran realizes that elections can be influenced (they watched the USA influence the first election), and having lots of paramilitary type forces that are trained in information operations, decides to capitalize. They flood across the porous border to spread propaganda (the current scumbags in government make it so the Iranian propaganda doesn't even have to lie, it just has to point out how much the current guys suck).

4. Iraqi citizens, growing sick of the crappy politicians they elected initially, start listening to the propaganda and elect a government friendly to Iran. This is the first time this has happened in a long time, Iraq has not been allies with Iran for several decades.

5. End result- USA invades, eventually loses influence to Iran. The global hegemony USA got outplayed by a regional hegemony because they backed unethical and incompetent sellouts rather than finding a good candidate.

Standing between Saudi Arabia and Iran was Saddam Hussein and his military. By removing him it created a power vacuum that has been filled by various groups over time.

The different election results in Iraq over the years now point to a chess game between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional control.

Now instead of Iraq standing between the other two, it's serving as a way to create conflict where the two may eventually fight each other like the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s.

If the U.S. does not get involved in this scenario then the long term strategic outcome of the 2003 Iraq war might be seen differently. On the other hand, if Iran wins and becomes more powerful, the Iraq war will look even worse.

Which is exactly what was predicted:

"That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you've got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with 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." -- Dick Cheney

Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Cheney the one that basically pushed the war? When is this quote from?

From the Wikipedia article:

> Following the US invasion of Iraq, Cheney remained steadfast in his support of the war, stating that it would be an "enormous success story",[90] and made many visits to the country. He often criticized war critics, calling them "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while US soldiers died in Iraq. In response, Senator John Kerry asserted, "It is hard to name a government official with less credibility on Iraq [than Cheney].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney#Iraq_War

It's a quote after the first Gulf War.

> instead of the commonly cited argument of securing resources for the American empire).

I'm sorry but there are very few "citations" that state that the war was about securing resources for the American "empire". It was primarily about exactly the stated reasons and there is a popular and uncited belief that it was about oil. If you have some scholarly articles that state that it was completely about oil I'd love to see them.

As someone alive and paying attention to that period in time, I got the impression the "for oil" thing was generally hyperbole never explicitly stated but probably loosely true right since the VP was an oil guy.

Except that American oil companies didn't get any benefit so how does that make any sense? If we are willing to accept the evidence that oil companies in the US didn't meaningfully benefit, doesn't that whole argument kind of seem silly?

It's bad enough that we invaded under pretenses that really really really should have been obviously incorrect at the time, with no plan, just... I don't know. It seems unnecessary to even bother linking it to oil. It was evil. It was stupid.

> Except that American oil companies didn't get any benefit so how does that make any sense? If we are willing to accept the evidence that oil companies in the US didn't meaningfully benefit, doesn't that whole argument kind of seem silly?

Let me start by saying that I don't know much about the history of this period. That being said, I imagine these questions can be answered in two ways:

1. If you don't succeed at doing X, it does not mean that you never intended to do X. Something as chaotic as war will be full of unintended consequences. Maybe American oil companies did not benefit as a result of the war, even though America wanted them to; similar to how ISIS was formed as a result of the war, even though America certainly didn't want it to.

2. I don't think the narrative has ever been that US wanted to directly benefit American oil companies, à la United Fruit Company. The theory is, rather, that the US wanted to ensure that the flow of oil to international markets would not be stopped due to Iraq's actions. Think of it this way: the work US navy does to secure international trading routes is not about directly benefiting US shipping and insurance companies. It is about keeping the wheels of global trade and economy moving. The US companies may benefit from this non-directly, but other nations and companies will benefit from this equally as well. The narrative is not about the US going to war as a colonizer to steal Iraqi oil or get sweetheart deals for US companies. It is that it went to war to ensure continued flow of Iraqi oil to the market and ensure Iraqi government would not throw a wrench in the oil shipments through the region. Ultimately, the reasons for the war, according to this theory, were economical rather than humanitarian or defence-related.

Now I don't know if the above statements are true. I just wanted to bring up the arguments and assertions people make, lest the debate delve into attacking a straw man.

It's the plan cooked up in the late 90s by a think tank called "Project for a New American Century"[0]. The founders were a bunch of reganites whose names pepper the list of high officials of the two Bush presidencies. They believed they could secure the middle east's resources and maintain US hegemony by fighting and winning several concurrent foreign wars. The crazy thing is they laid it all out in their publications three years before 9/11 gave them the political capital to mobilize their plans, and very few people talked about it during the war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...

Edit: relevant entry from the wikipedia article:

in 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times.[22][23] Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.[19][24] Portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region, and emphasizing the potential danger of any weapons of mass destruction under Iraq's control, the letter asserted that the United States could "no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections." Stating that American policy "cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," the letter's signatories asserted that "the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf."[25] Believing that UN sanctions against Iraq would be an ineffective means of disarming Iraq, PNAC members also wrote a letter to Republican members of the U.S. Congress Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott,[26] urging Congress to act, and supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (H.R.4655)[27][28] which President Clinton signed into law in October 1998.

"rather than finding a good candidate."

The idea that any part of the US government could do the sorts of things attributed to this "hegemony" is palpably ridiculous. Especially "find a good candidate". The US has a system for finding a good candidate to run a country, and it found Donald Trump.

If the hegemony that controls everything has been defeated at every turn for generations, clearly someone's talking bollocks. The more rhetoric like this you consume, the less you can appreciate what's going on.

I fail to see how this isn't a win for the US. The Iraqis get a less terrible government no matter who it is and we get to wash our hands of the situation without pissing off Israel or the Saudis.

It's not a win for the USA because one of their enemies gained influence in the region. It's really as simple as that, but:

The invasion also led to the rise of ISIS, which is widely seen as a embarrassment to the USA because they were supposed to be rebuilding a country and ended up allowing a large and deadly terrorist group to form under their noses.

And just to add on, there are literal losses as well. When the Iraqi army retreated from Mosul in 2014, they left behind a bunch of US supplied equipment that ISIS took control of. Iraq has "lost" at least a billion dollars of military equipment in recent years, most of which has been taken by ISIS and enabled terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Mosul https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-lost-track-1-billion-wo...

"Iraq has "lost" at least a billion dollars of military equipment in recent years"

That's...one tenth of one percent of the cost (to the US) of the war.

That’s the wrong measure by a long shot.

If I lose a $2000 rifle, and that rifle is then used to massacre a school, was the loss a mere $2000?

If you lost a thousand $2000 rifles, then the loss was a "mere" 0.1%. Plus or minus an order of magnitude (or two).

I mean, like, you are implying the other 99.9% of spending on the war was harmless or salutary?

No. I’m just saying that they used the money that we lost to gain strength and power, and they used those weapons to kill us and many others. Gaining power and resources provided them with the ability to leverage that and grow even more, and to fund new criminal enterprises. Focusing on the relatively small dollar amount we lost to them initially doesn’t really capture the total loss.

I think this is getting into the same territory as the difference between owing a bank a hundred bucks and a hundred million bucks.

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