Regarding Iraq: Because he cynically played enforcer for a lot of very rich (AKA influential) people who were scared that the US petrodollar hegemony was about to be supplanted by the Euro once people did the maths on Hussein’s recent successful pivot to Euro as reserve currency https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html - notice how the puppet government that was then installed made it one of their first tasks to switch the country’s reserve back to USD. The ongoing currency war was and is the actual war behind the “war” (wars).
Regarding Afghanistan: Everyone knew there was just too much “fog of war” to build a slam-dunk case against him for it. At best it would have ended up being framed by media as hand-waving about “wrong country” or “not just that country”. I remember scratching my head wildly though when he was spouting his “with us or against us” and “bomb them back to the stone age” rhetoric (and going unilateral - with the help of his Blair poodle - when the UN disagreed). He raced straight past “un-presidential” on his way to “extremely childish” when conflating “surgically remove some known terrorists from their hiding places” with “go all scorched earth on the entire country where they might have last been hiding”. There might have been some chance of making a case for recklessness (similar to the distinction between “manslaughter” & “murder”) - on the part of a jumped-up cowboy-wannabe playing “war president”, all hubristically drunk on the power he effectively inherited from his dad. As mentioned in many of the other comments though the US would never “allow” the ICC to bring such a conviction (undermining what the ICC is for), and any legal attempt within the US would just trigger screams of “you’re not a patriot” and “too soon” (still).
Maybe you can help me because I’m 20 or 30 paragraphs in to that essay and it hasn’t explained anything to me: it just repeats the same points over and over that “the REAL reason for the war was oil transactions currency and LOOK Saddam actually made money by switching and this is all UNREPORTED by US media!” (Repeat, ad nauseum).
What is an oil transaction currency?
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
It makes me highly suspicious that this author doesn’t take time early on to explain these basics, and instead spends a bunch of time at the top congratulating himself on all the nice emails he’s gotten.
I sympathise with your “TL;DR” feeling (why oh why do academics - including the extremely knowledgable ones - so often make their otherwise-valid points soooo long-winded and self-referential? …which is why I love the project started by Alan Alda - https://www.aldacenter.org/ by the way). In the author’s partial defence though the initial “note to readers” text is follow-up to responses and updates, before the guts of the essay which follows (I think he could have more clearly formatted those parts differently in coloured boxes or such, so people could easily/quickly see where the “the original content” starts),
Firstly I say persevere with the essay if you can bear it (even if you need to skim initial verbiage) - there are a lot of profound insights, especially considering it was written 20 years ago as events were happening, and it ultimately answers your questions comprehensively. However for some quicker on-ramps about its primary tenet I was able to find from a quick DDG-search of “petrodollar currency war” that the rest of the reporting world is slowly catching-up (in many cases only now, 20 years later). Some top-links I found from that search (which I mainly just skimmed the beginnings of for context, so don’t necessarily endorse entirely) are:
- https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/the-us-is-facing-a-major-challenge-as-petrodollar-loses-force-1032063614
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling
- https://followthemoney.com/americas-petrodollar-system-a-timeline-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-us-dollar/
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-petrodollars-rearranged-the-world/2021/08/11/3474aee2-ca09-11eb-81b1-34796c7393af_story.html
The Wikipedia link about Petrodollar-recycling seems to have a nicely concise summary to answer your question:
How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?
…and my very quickly typed (therefore far from accurate but hopefully high-level enough) answer would be something like this:
Following 1971 when the US forced termination of the Bretton Woods system (abandoned “gold-backed currency” for “fiat currency backed by smoke and mirrors”), by 1974 they became dangerously vulnerable due to over-spending on war (and some other endeavours) but found a quick-fix through petrodollar recycling (“buy loads of oil and the oil-producing country in-turn invests their profits heavily back into the US”). That was initially setup with Saudi Arabia but ended up being with all of OPEC, and because oil became the yardstick for international trade eventually the situation became such that the currency the world trades oil in became the de-facto “world trade” currency, and therefore the “international reserve currency”. This creates a scenario in which “the US going under would take much of the world under with it” (generalising and summarising very crudely). That of course incentivised much of the world to protect the USD (and therefore protect the US from itself) in myriad ways and seemingly incentivised the consequent US administrations to hubristically spend wild/reckless amounts (especially on war) feeling like they are immune to “Consequences [tm]”. The mantra was always “If you switch your reserve funds away from USD you will tank your country”, but over time the expanding Euro-spending block of countries were becoming as big (eventually bigger) oil-buyers than the US, and Iraq switching their reserve to Euro turned out not only to be non-problematic but even “very successful”. The US knew this would cause a chain-reaction of countries wanting to try the same switch to Euros (or at least be less phobic of considering it) so they needed it stomped out, while also finding other soundbite-friendly “reasons” for the stomping - screaming “look over here, look over here” so the mass-media would not notice the “petrodollar hegemony preservation” reason. WMDs was their gambit and it largely “worked” due to most people only listening to hot-button soundbites and retrofitting manufactured narratives to justify exceptionalism-fueled superficial knee-jerk responses. I think vanishingly few people would disagree with the fact that Hussein was a terrible, unforgivably criminal dictator, but not enough people asked “why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?”.
“why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?”.
Because for a time he was our guy in the region.
And then he wasn’t - when he stomped Kuwait. Are these people forgetting Desert Storm in 1991?
But mainly: let’s say that switching to the Euro was a great idea and more countries were likely to do it. How does going to war with Iraq stop anyone else from doing it? Are we really supposed to believe it was a threatening show of force to cow the entire world into throwing away profits and using our currency? This doesn’t make sense.
Like many many arguments, the author can’t be content with “here’s another factor in the mix of what happened” and just haaaas to say “everything else is lies - here’s the one and only explanation.”
Afghanistan was legit, how are people sold that it wasn’t so close to 9/11?
The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis lead by a US-trained individual that was later found and executed in Pakistan, where the group was founded. The only way Afghanistan was close to any of this was geographically.
You (intentionally?) leave out the important detail that the main orchestrator of the attack bin Laden / al-Qaeda were based in Afghanistan and Taliban refused to extradite him/them.
They offered to extradite him if America could prove that he was responsible. This seems reasonable until you realize that the only way to do this would be to offer the Taliban, who never were allies, a list of most of the US’ intelligence assets, so what would happen is they would either give OBL up or not but then would execute everyone supplying info.
It was easier and more expedient for GWB to go to war
Yeah it’s kinda hard to isolate sunni terrorism to a single location. America and Saudi Arabia funded a whole bunch of extremist madrasa in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a bid to oust the Soviet occupation.
This militant force was primarily led by Arab fighters who operated largely in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the hijackers were mostly Arab, but a lot of their organizational infrastructure operated out of central Asia.
Yes, Pakistan was, in a way, helping bin Laden to hide and evade the USA military. The fact that the USA never “tough talked” to Pakistan, even when the intelligence agencies left no doubt about that, is proof that Afghanistan was anything -but- legit.
That was all too early for me to be following any political news.
In a way (just this one way) I’m glad he didn’t.
At the time I was so in brainwashed conservative land. If I saw Bush get in trouble I would have stood by him simply because “Republicans good, Democrats bad”. And it might have affected my waking up to the actuality, and maybe slowed it down to the point where I’d be defending Trump now. If the last guy got in trouble but was Republican and therefore innocent, it’s just happening again, gosh dang those lefties.
That’s literally the depth of thought in that camp. I’ve been there and seen it, I did it myself. They don’t have any higher functioning logic to speak of. They really latch onto the victim mentality, even in their source of news. Since, at the time it got popular, Fox News was really the only right-leaning mainstream "news " network. I remember being told by my mom back then that it was the only one that wasn’t “super liberal”. And I took that at face value for years, not even questioning it. That’s all it takes when you’re that young. And then they’ll defend it to their last breath when they only think like that because they were suggested to once, and they build their whole world on it.
Had to scrape myself out of that thinking. Took me forever. Turns out deprogramming yourself against the thinking taught to you by everyone you’ve ever known and with only tangential knowledge of others you know doing it is difficult. I knew one guy that broke his programming, but didn’t really broadcast it, so I didn’t really catch on to much of it. But later I had a roommate that would talk about it all the time, and could back it up. That really got me thinking, and ended up being like the starter pebble you nudge down the hill that becomes the huge snowball. But that’s probably a story for a different kind of post. Probably a whole other community.
I didn’t really have any exposure to anything outside that world until I was 25 or so, when I met the previously mentioned roommate. I still find pieces of that old thinking and influence in me all the time.
Thanks for coming to my accidental TED talk. Got a ramble going there.
Edit- fixed typos and added the part about FN.
Afghanistan was NOT under false pretenses. The entire world stood besides the US for that. It was Iraq that was false pretenses and much of the world did not support that, and as it went on the ones that did, quickly stopped supporting it.
