Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> All of this could've been avoided under different leadership.

What do you mean? The war in Iraq has outlasted 3 US presidents, so clearly "different leadership" just doesn't work in practice.

IMO the US should completely change the modus operandi. "Invade & install new regime & call it democratic & steal oil" just isn't a good proposition for the local population. Unless the US can improve the proposition (to match China's "we give you lots of money and improve your quality of life") foreign military interventions just won't work.

View on HN

What oil did the US steal from Iraq?

I've been asking that question for about 15 years now, when people casually toss such empty claims out there. I've never once received a facts-based answer (for obvious reasons).

Iraq was about Russia, not oil. The same thing Syria and Libya are about. Trying to limit or strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. It's two major powers going at eachother via proxy, the same thing that has been going on all around the world between the US and Russia since WW2. Vietnam also wasn't about oil. Afghanistan also wasn't about oil.

The US lost over a trillion dollars in Iraq trying to keep the two major factions from killing eachother. There is no amount of oil that could ever come out of Iraq for the US that will make up for that.

>> Iraq was about Russia, not oil

Not Russia, Iran. Iraq was/is a proxy war between Iran and the Saudis. Russia and America are distant twice-removed cousins to a longstanding family dispute.

It was called production sharing, but ExxonMobil and Chevron from via the KRG.

Seems very similar to the bull billing the china shop owner.

>Iraq was about Russia

You are entirely wrong. Iraq was about Israel. The neoconservatives in the US pushing the invasion are Zionists and the entirety of US intervention in the ME is about strengthening Israel's position relative to the countries surrounding it. Sorry it took you 15 years to find the correct answer. You don't need to spend trillions invading countries just to get access to their oil, you can literally just buy it from them.

Almost the entirety of the Iraq war as well as all major decisions which affected the outcome were under the Bush administration. In 2008, the Bush administration agreed to withdraw all US troops from Iraq, and the Obama administration completed it. While US forces have returned to Iraq repeatedly since then to deal with various issues such as ISIS which are intimately linked to the mishandling of the Iraq war, there have been a number of other developments in the middle east such as the arab spring and the Saudi-Iranian cold war which are much more proximate to these separate conflicts.

Please emphasize the "steal oil" part. Im pretty sure that the liberators became invaders once the local population figured out that OIL was the #1 target.

I'm going to guess they are talking about different leadership from the one which started the Iraq war.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com