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."
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.
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.
