Or because the political goals were impossible or - almost breathtaking that this state can even exist - because the goals are entirely absent. Incidentally, having a "rotating roster" of different political goals probably counts as something worse than "absent", due to the illusory impression that it gives of "someone deciding something".
The democratic process is the selection of incompetent people by unqualified people.
That's what the public education system was supposed to prevent.
George Bernard Shaw
The lobbyists running the show in the background make money from both the destruction as well as the reconstruction. What is stupid about that?
The politicians later get appointed to lucrative executive roles at the companies which they helped enrich on taxpayer dollars (from both countries). Not stupid either. It's smart retirement planning.
The government is a lot of things but absolutely not stupid; fooling people into thinking it is incompetence is likely part of the ruse... It's a lot easier for people to sit back quietly and watch incompetence unfold, then it is to sit back and watch evil unfold. "It's incompetence" is also a nice easy answer which prevents people from having to look deeper as I have done here.
Julian Assange said about the war in Afghanistan: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war."
If you look at any war, you will realize that the same principles are at play. Our current global monetary order has a built-in mechanism for monetizing destruction, unfortunately. It's architected that way, intentionally or not.
I've dedicated much of my life so far to try to convey this simple message.
The way I see it there is a deep systemic issue beneath this which makes this profitable. That's the flaw which has to be solved.
Private entities should not be able to profit from taxpayer money on such vast scales. Military contacts are massive, foreign aid is massive. It takes from a large number of public hands and gives to a small number of private hands. Diffuse harms, concentrated gains.
I hope you're right though and those issues will be fixed.
"Who runs barter town" is imho the most geopolitically illuminating sentence to ever come out of Hollywood.. That's what it's all about.
no it is not, Russia is fighting an war of aggression on foreign soil
How much determinism they have is irrelevant.
Trump's unprovoked attacks on them were not only extremely costly due to the Strait of Hormuz closing, but it underscored why Iran absolutely needs nukes to protect themselves. It's virtually guaranteed they'll attain nuclear weapons inside the next decade now.
That's what happens when you elect a narcissistic fraudster to run your country and its foreign policy.