Posted on 07/17/2017 5:43:41 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran. A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border.
And that’s not even the half of it. Across the country, Iranian-sponsored militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by Iran’s leadership.
When the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were poured into the cause. From Day 1, Iran saw something else: a chance to make a client state of Iraq, a former enemy against which it fought a war in the 1980s so brutal, with chemical weapons and trench warfare, that historians look to World War I for analogies. If it succeeded, Iraq would never again pose a threat, and it could serve as a jumping-off point to spread Iranian influence around the region. In that contest, Iran won, and the United States lost. …
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Bump for later.
George W. Bush deserved every bit of it. He pissed away thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars on his stupid war-mongering globalism.
I think we were being mild, in fact. He deserves a lot worse than that.
Saddam was no friend of ours notwithstanding.
And he was a Nazi. The Ba’ath Party is based on the combination of Arab Nationalism and Arab Socialism. Nazism preceded the Ba’athists in Egypt too, through Nasser.
But we supported him for awhile against Iran which created a sort of balance of power as it were and middle east stability as best as could be expected. Of course Hussein was a brutal evil bastard but unfortunately that’s what it takes to control brutal evil bastard people in some parts of the world. Look what we’ve got now!
The left supported him, more like. Originally, these Islamic national-socialist regimes were supported by the USSR to oppose US influence and of course to put Israel on the back foot. Essentially, “we” have done the wrong thing in the region since 1947.
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