Stas Bush wrote:Isn't that so? I mean, how much chaos over the decades has the US caused? Tons. Shitloads. Maybe they don't have that goal in mind. But then they're just fucking morons. And also they are morons with a useless crusade just to make people's lives even more miserable. And they keep repeating it over and over.
Or maybe you are right, and both the people and the government of the US really are fucking idiots with a 4-year attention span. I like the sound of it. But it is scary.
It is, however, true by all appearances. I will go into more depth below.
Stas Bush wrote:Thanas wrote:And you have to spend billions of dollar to ensure that:
a) not that many refugees do drown when trying to reach Europe
b) spending to combat illegal immigration
c) spending on the security forces to prevent terrorists to retaliate
d) spend hundreds of million to intervene when things get too hot
Well Thanas, consider this: the US does not care about drowning refugees (not that this problem is widely cared about outside Italy anyway). The US already spends millions to combat illegal immigration - and on security.
Yes, and it's
expensive.
Stop and think. Which narrative makes more sense:
1) The US/West knowingly seeks to destroy any and all quasistable or competent governments in the Middle East, for fear of allowing rivals to emerge. And has no problem spending indefinitely large amounts of money 'securing' itself against the terrorists it's stirring up. But despite this, the US/West continues to spend tens or hundreds of billions on
development aid to these countries, when it would be trivially easy to just arm the terrorists and guerillas and stand back while they rip countries apart.
OR
2) The US/West does not have a coherent policy
either to beggar the Middle East
or to build it up. It spends huge sums of money on security because it perceives a threat. It spends money on development aid when ideological or political arguments dictate it should do so. Sometimes they advocate spending money, sometimes not. Sometimes they advocate backing a dictator against rebels, sometimes backing rebels against a dictator. There is, I repeat, no coherent policy.
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If (1) is true, then the strategists responsible for the overall Western plan to beggar the Middle East are so stupid it strains the imagination. The US spent
two trillion dollars trying to stabilize, control, and establish a very specific sort of regime in Iraq. They wound up turning Iraq into a wartorn hellhole instead. And therefore you accuse them of having intended this outcome all along.
I think that you are committing the classic error of the conspiracy theorist: assuming that because things happened in a certain way, they must have been planned and pre-arranged that way by some powerful force. I disagree. Believe me, it would have been a lot cheaper to do nothing
but ensure that Iraq turned into a wartorn hellhole. The expensive part was the (largely futile) effort to maintain law and order in the country while rebuilding infrastructure that had withered under a decade of war and a decade of embargo.
It is hard to imagine that anyone could possibly have made a logical calculation 'proving' that turning Iraq into a wartorn hellhole was worth
two trillion dollars, or even a fraction of that enormous sum, to the United States. The idea is ridiculous.
So in short, (1) totally fails to explain US actions in Iraq. (2), on the other hand, can do so easily, because it boils down to "governments act according to shifting winds of ideology and politics, and do not have a consistent policy of either beggaring or building the Middle East. They do whatever seems convenient and ideologically proper to do at that momnet."
For example, neocon ideology says that spending aid money in Iraq while making it a bastion of corporate-capitalist-democracy is good (see New American Century). So Bush spends lots of money there after his invasion, because his goal is to achieve an end-state predicted by neocon ideology... and neocon ideology says that it'll be worth the money in the long run. So, again, Bush spends huge amounts of money on aid programs that require very expensive security forces to keep in operation. Even if this is far less efficient as a way to make people healthy and educated than spending the money in a country NOT torn apart by a massive guerilla war.
But then political constraints tell Obama he should pull out of Iraq. And Obama does not care about neocon ideology, so he pulls out and spends almost NO money on Iraq. And he totally abdicates power over events there, writing off as sunk costs the huge amount of blood and treasure spent by Bush. And
only then do radicals take over a large chunk of the country.
Thus, the invasion and hellhole-izing of Iraq under Bush, and the takeover by radical fundamentalist Sunnis under Obama, do not reflect a coherent policy of "beggar thy neighbor." They reflect the US taking an interest in forcibly changing Iraq, then giving up on that interest. Which was done for reasons that have little to do with any overriding national geopolitical strategy and much to do with internal political debates.
Thanas wrote:The idea that there is a vast western conspiracy to encourage terrorism and civil war is completely ludicrous.
That says the person well aware of the fact that the US consciously created a network of fascist terrorists inside Europe, aptly calling it operation GLADIO.
But in that case the fascist terrorists' terrorism was directed against communists, and people that the CIA and so on thought of as communist sympathizers. The CIA had no intention of creating terrorist networks whose rage would be directed at
themselves.
For the US/West/Whatever to knowingly create a network of Islamic fundamentalist regimes with a policy of using terrorism for political ends would be, oh... about as dumb as the Cold War KGB channeling money to the creation of violent anticommunist militias. Arguably worse, since the hostility of the anticommunist militias would be aimed against
foreign communists, and the Soviet Union itself would have no need to directly fear them. Whereas the US has excellent reason to fear terrorism and hostility coming from Islamic fundamentalist groups. Such hostility is aimed directly at the US and has real power to harm or at least gravely inconvenience the US.
If the US creates such a threat to itself, it seems far more likely that this is an accident, not a deliberate policy.
I mean, 'vast conspiracy'? No. Enough is the mere fact that the United States does not care if women are stoned and people's heads are cut off, in fact, it can even intervene on behalf of the very fucking people who stone women and behead those who say Islam is violent.
Wrap that fact around your head. The US, and sometimes Europe, intervened many times on behalf of people so hideous you woudn't want them to sit near you in a bar.
The only major intervention that has occurred under Obama was in Libya, and the Libyan intervention was on behalf of a bizarre and confused blur of different rebel organizations who agreed on only one thing: Muammar Gaddafi had to go.
Since the US had never liked Gaddafi anyway, and since even Obama holds a lingering ideological belief that 'democracy' in some vague sense should triumph over dictatorship as long as it's not too inconvenient... this resulted in US intervention against Gaddafi. Not because of any particular desire to make Libya a hellhole, but because of ideology and historical cases of Gaddafi antagonizing the West.
Channel72 wrote:In fact, the US has spent billions building up the infrastructure of Iraq
The US has invaded the place, and turned it into a Mad Max anarchy wasteland outside the 'green zone' (pretty much like Afghanistan). When you invade a nation, that destabilizes the nation.
You know this, because you are not an idiot.
George Bush, Jr.... WAS an idiot. By all appearances, including the testimony of senior figures in his administration, and numerous journalists who had highly placed access to his deliberations. He actually thought that invading Iraq would make it MORE stable, not less. Somehow, he was able to persuade large numbers of pro-idiocy people in America (and other nations) to go along with this idiocy.
Thus, Iraq has become a hellhole. Afghanistan was a hellhole even before the US showed up, due to the
Soviets intervening in the place in the 1980s and the US proceeding to cheerfully back Afghan guerillas as a cheap way of giving the Soviets a black eye.
[Incidentally, the US intervention in Afghanistan in the '80s is a great example of how to make a country a hellhole
cheaply, rather than wasting huge amounts of money doing it expensively]
But the US went further: it bombed Libya. It intervened on behalf of Libya's islamist rebels. It funneled aid, through third parties, to 'rebels' of Syria, many of which proceeded to work in the ISIS.
This, again, was due to ideology that blinded the US to the true nature of the factions it was backing. Many of the dumber US 'intellectuals' decided that the end of the Cold War meant that some kind of historical inevitability was causing US-style government to replace other governments. So they just ignorantly assumed that anyone seeking to overthrow a dictator would automatically end up creating a Western-style government. NOT an Islamic fundamentalist government.
Idiocy, not a coherent policy of beggaring the Middle East.
If Western politicians are as dumb as you are, I can believe that this is totally unexpected. But I do not. I don't believe the politicians are so fucking moronic as to sponsor rapists and cutthroats with no goal behind it. Maybe it's my cynism, but it is rather clear to me that Islamists are the best political weapon to keep the Middle East poor, like dirt poor, permanently at war, and disunited.
But if they are cynical and cunning enough to do this, surely they are also cynical and cunning enough not to waste trillions of dollars and destroy their own political careers by doing this in a needlessly expensive fashion.
American politicians have ALWAYS been hamhanded incompetents when it comes to foreign policy, with precious few exceptions I can think of. The American political process does not in any way reward or promote political candidates for having a clear understanding of history, geopolitics, or foreign cultures. At least half the US's political elite has unbreakable ties to a fake-intelligentsia of complete babbling halfwits who substitute ignorance and racism and hagiography of their own nation for actual analysis of the people they're dealing with. As a result, the American military-industrial-espionage-foreign-policy establishment is massively contaminated with idiots, on a level that you may be unable to imagine but which is very real.
Honestly, if the US's political establishment DID have a conspiracy going to accomplish some end in foreign policy, they would most likely end up accomplishing the opposite. Because of idiocy.
