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?

Question

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

Answer 1

Oil. Our lust for oil brought roving Bedouins out of the desert and made them trillionaires. Those leaders (all men) in the Middle East didn’t exactly support democratic egalitarian societies. In Iran, the U.S. and England help install the Shah to, guess what, push for better and better oil deals. The Shah was overthrown in 1979 by religious clerics headed by the Ayatolla Komehni (sp?) which leaves us with the religious extremist Iran of today. The Ayatollah regime then held American hostages as part of the overthrow of Shah (Google the Iran hostage crisi). That history with Iran is important background for what has unfurled since in the Middle East.

Which leads us to Iraq. Yet again, we got involved in their politics, largely in support of a failed assassination attempt on the Shah of Iraq (part of the reason was the Cold War but also, access to cheap oil). Saddam Hussein rose up to Iraqi leadership and in 1963, we supported overthrow of the Shah to install….Saddam Hussein and the Sunni Baathist party to power. You probably know the history after we, uh, then assassinated Saddam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein

In short, America’s continual interference in middle eastern politics have been some, but not all, of the factors that lead to where we are today. W Bush naively pushed into Iraq to oust the Sunnis from power to even more naively install a secular democracy in a society that is largely controlled by religion. That also didn’t end well but scored huge brownie points with the Bush family’s oil buddies. The morons in the W Bush administration (Condaleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, etc et al) literally didn’t even know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims. That in of itself is the definition of American hubris.

On 9/12/2001, instead of having a president lobby to castrate the terrorist states that hate our guts (fueled by our oil money) by immediately pivoting to massive investment in renewable energy supplemented by domestic oil and gas drilling (one of those two things happened), he told Americans to go shopping.

We’re not the good guys in this history.

-note, many edits-