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
So it’s super complicated, but I’ll try to sum it up.
It actually started well before the war in Iraq. The US helped put saddam and the Ba’ath party in power in the 1970s, and spent most of the 80s empowering saddam, largely by sending him weapons and helping him against Iran and the Kurdish people in Iraq. After the end of the Cold War, our leaders needed a new “big bad”, and who better than the (legitimately shitty) dictator that we had made dependent on us?
Now, saddam was absolutely a monster, but he had built Iraq into one of the most modern nations in the middle east. He ruled with an iron grip, and killed a lot of dissenters, but the Iraqi literacy rate was above 90%, and most of the country was electrified. However, due to the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s (during which we were selling weapons to both sides), the country was in a bad spot financially. They had taken out a lot of loans to fund their war effort and purchase weapons from western nations, and the price of oil was too low for the country’s economy to continue to function. To attempt to fix this, he decided to ramp up tensions with his neighbor, Kuwait. Kuwait was a monarchy/dictatorship (as were all of the gulf countries) but our foreign policy held them up as “the good guys” so that we could get domestic and international support for intervention, eventually resulting in an “international” coalition that intervened in the conflict, resulting in the gulf war. Ostensibly, our goal was to oust Hussein, however some of our military leaders were quoted as wanting to “bomb them back to the pre-industrial era”, which we did – [we intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure, destroying 90% of iraqs electrical capacity, targeted food processing facilities, seed storage, water processing, and reservoirs.](https://aldeilis.net/english/physical-destruction-iraqs-infrastructure-gulf-war/). The result of this was essentially that Iraq spent the rest of the 90s in famine with most of the country living on starvation diets, dealing with massive disease outbreaks, and having a fraction of the electrical capacity they had prior to the gulf war. They also couldn’t hope to recover because a) we sustained bombing campaigns even after the war ended, and b) they were under crazy sanctions that would never allow their economy or infrastructure to recover.
Fast forward to dubyah. We had maintained saddam as the “big bad” and were itching for war. Iraq complied with UN inspections, but our leaders had set it up so that we’d cast doubt on them no matter what – if they didn’t comply then they were hiding it, if they did then they were obviously just hiding it really well and trying to get out from under sanctions, the whole time we were amassing troops in allied middle eastern nations and bullying other countries (through threats to withhold aid, threats of sanctions, etc) to join another country. We end up invading and start the process of de-baathification, which was really used as score settling by locals accusing their rivals of being linked to the Ba’ath party, and removing officials from vital posts. Our “nation building” was mostly grift from people who stood to gain from taking over iraqs oil production capabilities (at this point they gain nothing from oil extraction, while multinational corporations take in profits), contracting companies who stood to gain from being an unofficial extension of the American military, and a litany of other individuals and organizations who stood to gain more from a destabilized Iraq than from a stable one. We also sent the entire military home after we took Iraq over – imagine the impact of 10s of thousands of pissed off, armed, and unemployed people.
There’s other factors as well – indiscriminate killing of civilians for decades, stuff like abu grahib (the torture prison run by Americans), Iraqi people killed and imprisoned under suspicion of being baathists and terrorists, all while our leaders lauded the newfound freedom of Iraq.
An economy in the gutter; a total lack of infrastructure; a sudden power vacuum; whole generations traumatized by war, famine, and disease. All of that makes it easier for extremist organizations to organize and recruit. Add in money from states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and arms sales from all sides (including us). Not to mention that the military we installed was ostensibly modeled after our own, which requires technology and infrastructure that’s impossible to maintain without a functioning economy, and you have a situation where the Iraqi government had absolutely no chance to stand up to an organization like isis.
Sorry if this is jumbled. I definitely missed some factors, and I’m probably not exactly correct on everything. It’s a super complicated situation that goes back 50+ years. The long and short is that our actions in the Middle East have never been about promoting peace and stability, or spreading democracy to people living under brutal dictators, but about American political and corporate interests- which is what our foreign policy has literally always been about.
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