Eli5: how did America actually destabilize the Middle East in the Iraq war? What was done specifically that caused all of the chaos in the countries we were involved in?
In: 185
Americas efforts go well back before the Iraq war and can be tracked back before the Suez Crisis an the first Israeli wars. All of the conflicts in the NE region were manipulated proxy wars by both the United States and Soviet Union with their own propped up tinpot dictators at the helm getting thrown copious amounts of money. Soviets supported Egypt, US supported Isreal.
Americas involvement support of Israel and their invasion of Egypt led Arab countries to form OPEAC and placed an embargo on Oil exports to the US. this caused the infamous 1970s Oil crisis where the price of gas has been spurned by a stone drop in Oil Supply. the US govt being the superpower it was, realized it was an intrinsically Oil hungry country, and it needed to sustain a steady supply at all costs in order to keep thr economic powerhouse running as well as its arms race against the Soviets. It didn’t help the entire Middle East was basically erupting in social and political conflict for most of the 20th century, some places worse than others. with revolutions spilling over from one country to the next the most well remembered was the Algerian and the Iranian revolution, where France was contemplating giving Algeria its own independence at a time when the old systems colonialism was effectively disintigrating. the latter event involved the royal family getting ousted in a Coup to be replaced by an Islamic republic.
The US gov’t sentt money and weapons through military contractors to insurgent uprisings against Soviet Occupiers. Soviets leave Afghanistan allowing US to have unrequited access to ME countries. To get an understanding of what years of culminating conflict and investment into the military industrial complex looked like, look into combat footage of Operation Desert storm and Operation shock and awe from the 90s to 2000’s…years of geopoliticking and leveraging countries into submission gave the US almost unparalleled military prowess especially as the Soviet Union could no lie mger afford to keep up the arms race with the US.
.thousands if not hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in the span of a few weeks. it was up in the air whether US was even targeting military installations in the first place. Collateral damage was massive in these wars and the US basically took their brand of police brutality and amped it up overseas with even more powerful military hardware.To this day these campaigns alone served as bleak reminders that in order to sustain our freedoms , America has callously exploited other people for their own gain and we vilify them as the bad guys. military contractors were notorious for torturing and gunning down civilians in random. The US freely committed war crimes post 9/11.
There are entire books written on this topics that a post like this will not be able to provide enough context for but as a general gist. There ya go. Those were the major events and circumstances surrounding them
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