There is no way anyone can justify 18 years of sacrificing American blood and treasure in the Middle East. The fallout of this includes millions of refugees that causes it’s own serious long term problems.
Still, you don’t seem to acknowledge the real reason for our interest in oil-rich ME, namely, the preservation of the petrodollar.
It’s not simply they sit on top of vast amounts of black gold, but it is absolutely imperative all that crude be sold for US Dollars.
Unless I missed it, I don’t think you mentioned that part.
[There is no way anyone can justify 18 years of sacrificing American blood and treasure in the Middle East.]
The cost is peanuts, although the Democratic media complex has been hyping it up. We lost 5000 dead in Iraq. That’s compared to 58K in Korea and 38K in Vietnam. Budget-wise, we spent 1/4% of annual output per year on Iraq. We spent 50% per year on WWII.
As to refugees, there’s no problem. Post-war Japan an Germany had refugee problems. Millions of orphans and widows. 10% of Germany and 5% of Japan lay dead. Millions of homes turned into rubble. The world said you will deal with it, and shut the door to them. So they did. There is no refugee problem - there’s a run to the West; there’s an open door policy problem.
[Still, you don’t seem to acknowledge the real reason for our interest in oil-rich ME, namely, the preservation of the petrodollar.]
I don’t know which crank originally came up with this theory, but it’s a load of hooey. Oil is traded in dollars because the US is the largest and most economy in the world. They use the dollar as the benchmark currency because it is the most liquid currency, meaning switching between dollars and riyals costs the least. The fact that oil is priced in dollars confers no particular advantage to us. When the dollar weakens against the major currencies, oil suppliers simply raise the dollar price of oil. For instance, while the price of oil in dollars is double what it was in the 80’s, the price in yen has actually gone down.