Why did Bill Clinton keep on bombing Iraq after the Gulf War (don't tell me it was because of the plot to kill Bush, that's been debunked as a false flag). Iraqi oil made up 3% of US oil consumption at the time of the Iraq war it decreased further from there.I assume people are going to talk about how Iraq switched to Euros for Iraqi oil in Nov 2000, threatening the petrodollar. That doesn't explain why Clinton did it though. Was there some larger geo-political project going on here?
Why did the US bomb Iraq after the Gulf War ?
Thomas Barnes
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Colton Nguyen
And Iraqi oil made up 3% of US oil consumption at the time of the Iraq war. It decreased further from there. So I guess the 2003 war wasn't for oil. Is it really all about the petrodollar?
Lincoln Nguyen
world domination
Elijah Kelly
Ah shit. I just repeated myself with that stat. Why did the US go to war with Iraq in 2003 I guess is the question.
Ian Morris
I think there was a larger project, like you said, but it was literally a project of establishing US dominance in the region. It wasn’t strictly about the oil in Iraq, though you have to consider that oil in that region was arguably more important for our allies and clients than ourselves. It was about Iraq stepping out of line in Kuwait and us utterly crushing them to make an example of them and remind the world what we were capable of. Remember that since Vietnam the US probably looked a little fragile in terms of prolonged direct conflicts even with relatively poor states. We had invaded other countries since then, but Iraq involved a foreign territory grab by a prominent client of ours. They literally annexed Kuwait. I think the continued bombardment and sanctions was literally just a total fuck you to Saddam and a pet project of the military-industrial complex, though maybe there is more nuance to it than that. I know the military actually asked reporters not to publish pictures of the Iraqi formal surrender during the first gulf war because they “didn’t want to humiliate them”, but I’m not sure if that was just mixed messages coming from different branches of government, because Saddam was basically painted as a global menace and a maniac until 2003.
Ayden Thomas
I sorta see the 1991 Persian Gulf War as a catastrophe resulting from the U.S. "tilt" towards Iraq in the 1980s backfiring. The purpose of that tilt was to contain Iran, which had revolutionary designs on the Middle East. The problem for the U.S. is that the only real shared position among Iraq's various political and ethnic factions was the belief that Kuwait was the country's 19th province separated by the British on arbitrary lines. The U.S. also signaled to Saddam months before the invasion that the U.S. had no position on the subject. Whether the U.S. intended to signal to Saddam that it was acceptable to invade Kuwait or not is beside the point – as it's likely that Saddam at least interpreted it this way, or at least was fed up with the U.S. games of tilting and signaling.
Right. The U.S. rules by superpower dependency. It creates markets for weapons, it develops clientele within the military and intelligence apparatuses of other countries, avenues of influence, etc. It's divide-and-rule via "mutually assured destabilization" or something like that. Keep the world that way, and you can open it up to those who deal in blood and oil.
I think Iraq/Kuwait blew up in the Bush administration's face. So in one sense the U.S. troops were sent in to "restore the balance of power," but in another sense the U.S. reacted by tilting harder toward Saudi Arabia, which the U.S. flooded with weapons – while back in Washington D.C. the same Council on Foreign Relations "wonks" could stay employed writing policy papers for think tanks (also funded by oil and weapons conglomerates) arguing that they should still be the ones calling the shots re: U.S. foreign policy.
Remember the U.S. government's no. 1 enemy in the Middle East for nearly 40 years has been Iran, which is why the U.S. tilted toward Iraq in the beginning. That blew up, so the U.S. stuck Saddam in a "box" to contain him. After the 9/11 attacks, however, an opportunity came up to finally sweep this mess away once and for all by invading Iraq, removing Saddam, and turning Iraq into an anti-Iranian client state. Policy makers in the Defense Department were seriously imagining turning Iraq into a kind of Middle East version of South Korea or Japan. Of course it was a disaster.
Xavier Hernandez
By the way, here's a fun thing: the flag the U.S. occupation authorities made for Iraq in 2004. The similarities to the Israeli flag made it not so popular, however, and Shia insurgents burned it, and it was never adopted. But it's a visual example of how the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith types in the DoD and State Department were thinking of their new Iraqi client state.
James Wilson
I vaguely remember the US bombing Iraq at least once in the late '90s. I don't remember the exact pretext, but it must have been something like Trump's strikes against the Syrian Air Force.
To add some context, Iraq was crippled and strangled for more than a decade after HW's Gulf War (1991) up to W's full scale invasion and toppling of Saddam (2003).
All that shit sowed - at least in part - the seeds of a strenghtened Wahhabi terrorism all across the ME and beyond, of the future Syrian civil war, of the consequent mass flight of a million plus people into Europe and thus of the rise of the far right there.
Even if the oil imported by the US from Iraq is a relatively small percentage, that doesn't mean US oil companies cannot profit from gaining concessions to pump and sold Iraqi oil to other countries. That wasn't possible with the Man from Tikrit in power. That became possible after he was removed.
Apparently someone said that if Iraq's main export had been broccoli, there would have never been a war.
Aaron Phillips
Interesting quote by Eightch Dubya on this topic, said right after the Iraqi surrender
Eli King
So is the petrodollar just a meme made by libertarians ? Why was Gaddafi deposed of ? I've always heard that it was because he was trying to switch to a gold based currency for trading oil in along with a ton of other African nations. Is the currency thing bunk and the US was just scared of a united Africa or what ?
Wyatt Flores
In the film W by Oliver Stone, at one point Dick Cheney starts explaining to the cabinet a grand plan to subdue the ME once and for all. The bigger and final target was Iran.
I think also Wesley Clark said something in public about detailed plans to invade several places in the ME.
Something that shouldn't be overlooked is the balance of power among Arab states. The Gulf monarchies backed Saddam in the '80s against Iran lending him a huge amount of money. They hated him and they knew he had egemonic plan for the Arab world, but the Iraq-Iran war kept him conveniently busy while causing incredible damage to an even worse foe for the Sunni monarchies. Remember: Iran supported what was to become Hezbollah in Lebanon, a huge torn in the side of Saudia's local referents; they supported Syria; they openly said any revolution overthrowing the Sunni monarchies would have been welcome and so on.
To get back to my point: at the end of the '80s Iraq and Iran agreed on a ceasefire. Saddam had failed in his grandiose plan to conquer Iran's oil fields and vanquish the "Safavids" once and for all, turning in the new, powerful, glorious leader of the Arab world. Now, he had to pay back his debts to the Gulf states. Problem was, they were pumping oil like there was no tomorrow and the oil price was ridiculously low. They didn't want to help and so Saddam was in really, really deep shit.
His move on Kuwait was like an impromptu attempt to scare off the Saudis and their allies and at the same time getting a much desired victory on the battlefield, after the humiliation of the failed victory against Iran which had also costed hundreds of thousands of deaths and POWs. Perhaps he didn't think the US and half of the world would react like they eventually did. Maybe he thought the USSR would have vetoed the thing.
He fucked up big time. That was like Mussolini turning against England and France to jump on the Hitler bandwagon. An amateurish move that in a few years time came back to bite him.
Apologies for the effortpost.
Luke Gutierrez
The US wanted to take out “former soviet client states” in the early 2000s so that when the “second cold war began” all the “former soviet client states” won’t be a threat to Washington. The Neocons knew that America being the sole hegamon was unlikely to last, they just wanted the world to just be very easy for America when the new supepower showed up.
David Barnes
You're right, he only bombed them at the beginning of 93 for the alleged assassination plot and then in 98 for after Sadam refused to let inspectors into the Baath party headquarters and the US got pissed so the Iraqis realized that the US would not honor its previous commitment to only allowing 4 inspectors into these sensitive areas.
A quote from Scott Ritter: "Bill Clinton said, “This proves the Iraqis are not cooperating,” and he ordered the inspectors out. But, you know, the United States government ordered the inspectors to withdraw from the modalities without conferring with the Security Council. It took the Iraqis by surprise. Iraqis were saying, “We’re playing by the rules, why aren’t you? If you’re not going play by the rules, then it’s a game that we don’t want to participate in.” Bill Clinton ordered the inspectors out. Saddam didn’t kick them out."
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Angel Butler
To be honest I haven't read much about Gaddafi's monetary experiments. The idea of Gaddafi becoming the leader of a united Africa seems pretty far-fetched to me. If you asked me who I think is the most powerful and important African leader of this century I'd say Paul Kagame of Rwanda, not Gaddafi, who was a fairly minor figure with some influence in the Sahel.
I also wonder why libertarians go for this theory; seems self-serving. Do libertarians think that if we just returned to the gold standard in the U.S. that it would end U.S. imperialism? I tend not to look at U.S. imperialism as resulting from a single approximate cause like that but a larger process that is typically opportunistic. An opportunity came up to get into Libya so the U.S. sent in Khalifa Haftar, who has long been a CIA asset (look up the "National Front for the Salvation of Libya" active in the 1980s) and lived in Langley for awhile. But Libya is not a very important country.
Leo Lewis
Kagame is only know because of muh Hutu murders. Rawanda is a tiny country with a tiny population. It has some cash, but besides that it’s a dot on the map. It’s the African version of Luxembourg. Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa are the strongest countries in Africa.
Adam Johnson
you create eternal war to avoid class war
Nolan Gonzalez
I think it’s interesting that we are put in this position of guessing what the reasons are for various wars, but mainly because it isn’t specific to leftists or Nazis or libertarians. I think there are a lot of people that, especially after the lies of Iraq were revealed, asked themselves “why the hell did we do it?” It was like a mass hypnosis was broken, the conflicts became too uncanny. The Cold War conflicts were premised on beating back communism. The first gulf war was justified as stopping a bellicose maniacal Arab hitler from conquering the Middle East. Then 2003 happens, and the Bush admin says Iraq is connected to islamic terrorism and also have chemical weapons. It’s largely accepted, and when it’s revealed to have been total bullshit it is one of the first times the moral plausibility for a conflict just fucking objectively fell flat. The culture had to reconcile with that, and it split among a million different strains of interpretation, though I think the commonplace one was always this vague gesturing at “oil”, the acknowledgment that our government was likely so corrupt that it killed hundreds of thousands of people so private companies could somehow benefit from Iraqi oil.
Evan Gutierrez
It's largely subjective, but I think Kagame is like a Lee Kuan Yew figure. Rwanda is a small country but it's the densest one on the continent. He's extremely ruthless and effective, and Rwanda's intelligence agencies are the most wide-reaching (and lethal) of any on the continent, and he's serving as a potential model for other leaders to follow.
I think a lot of top state/government/business people think of the world in a very different way than most of the population. The lies used to promote wars are debated by the press and public, but the people at the top are looking at the world as this chaotic thing that they just have to "manage." And the world is always in a state of reorganization and flux with different powers trying to adjust it to their advantage; military, diplomatic, commercial. A terrorist bomb goes off somewhere; that sounds bad to us but for the people at the top, it's just part of the general background noise. Iraq for the U.S. was a long-term strategic "problem" (largely as a result of America's own making) and the invasion was an attempted "solution" in a sense.
Noah Hernandez
I don't know if Gaddafi's plan for a Pan-African gold backed currency was viable. But if it was, it would have been a huge pain in the ass for France. Better: it could have spelt the end of the so called Françafrique, i.e. French imperialism in Africa. Obviously, it would have required some big player backing it. And talking about Africa, the mind goes immediately to China.
Anyway, we now know that Gaddafi's gruesome elimination was something Sarkozy desperately needed. This scumbag had accepted money from the Colonel for his 2007 presidential campaign. He violated a few French laws in accepting that money and now he's in trouble for that anyway. Interestingly, Sarkozy was also one of the most pro-US French leaders of the last few decades. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, a more prudent figure still aligned to the Gaullist tradition, famously kept France out of the Iraq quagmire in 2003.
Anyway, I think Gaddafi was actually considered as a potential risk for French interests in Africa. At some point, he scrapped his original Pan-Arabism to embrace Pan-Africanism. In a few decades he spent a considerable amount of money in aid to many African countries - with a lot of former French colonies among them - and it seems he was quite popular in many parts of the continent. Pic related reminds us he supported Mandela and his ANC while he was prisoner in South Africa and many in the UK and US governments regarded him as a terrorist.
There's no doubt France played the lion share in the destruction of Lybia in 2011, like there's no doubt the UK was there too - after all, they already made an attempt on the Colonel's life in the '90s. The US did their thing obviously, and Hillary was the most enthusiastic supporter of this adventure. Obama seemed much less so but he didn't do much to avoid the carnage.
Charles Long
Interesting post. Thanks. Speaking of his popularity in other parts of Africa…
Robert Reyes
Same reason they bombed Japan after they had given up.
They're assholes.
Jordan Perry
Um… actually… US hegemony is a good thing! If Iraq had peacefully stopped genociding Kurds, adopted liberal democracy and agreed with Kuwait to share the oil reserve they would have been as prosperous and good as Israel :)
Henry Johnson
iraq wanted to dump the dollar like libya did a few years later.
oil doesent mean shit, its the value of the dollar that wars are fought over.
Wyatt Gonzalez
That he did. Here's a webm.
Justin Flores
This is a pretty pathetic answer to one of the most important things to happen in the last 30 years. The US didn't bomb Japan "because they're assholes", they did it because they wanted to flex their power to a growing Soviet union.
Okay I I understand how the petrodollar is propped up by using the US dollar as the 1 currency that all oil transactions are made. I don't understand how keeping US dollars in their reserves helps the US. How does the US benefits from that?
Levi Nelson
if they dump the dollar it doesent just mean the dollar will lose value by not being in demand for (not just) oil market transactions, it also means that the iraqi reserves would be exchanged and iraq would start using euros or gold as a reserve currency.
that also means all the billions of dollars iraq had in reserves would go on the market (at an even lower price to enable a fast reserves update) creating massive inflation.
and additionally after that the US banking sytem would also be unable to sell bonds or monetary reserves to iraq which is combined with longterm inflation (under US control) the primary source of revenue for the US banking system.
and thats just iraq.
when iraq would undoubtebly see an economic boom after dumping the dollar and adopting the euro (surpassing many US sanctions and hars exchange terms) other countries would tend to follow the example.
Saddams pen and paper were more dangerous to the US than all the might of the iraqi army and supposed weapons of mass destruction
Hudson Peterson
...
Levi Green
Mobutu would’ve crushed Rwanda if they weren’t allied with Uganda.