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
The premise of your question is flawed because the Middle East was already plenty unstable before the Iraq War.
Another unpopular opinion of mine that will get the downvotes coming in batches is that, if the US had done nothing in Iraq, it is highly probable that Iraq would have experienced the same instability and factional conflict that occurred in Syria.
The middle east has been fighting since the dawn of time. America had nothing to do with it.
It’s because Iraq was Sunni minority ruled via a Saddam Hussein dictatorship that abused the majority Shia. There was also decent size Kurd population.
Of note, neighboring Iran is majority Shia. And neighboring Turkey can’t stand the Kurds.
Also of note, they are sitting on a shit ton of oil.
Therefore, when we went in there for bullshit reasons, killed over 100,000 civilians and then tried to set up a democracy, the Shia were pissed for being abused for so long and got help from Iran. The Kurds were pissed to and we’re getting shit from Sunni’s, Shia and the Turks…
And they all were fighting for power and oil while being (a) pissed at us for invading them, (b) already having high levels of corruption…etc…
Stopped following, so not sure how the Iraq chaos that we caused impacted Syria but I know climate change played a part in Syria on top of it being another dictatorship that oppressed it’s people. I also think Syrian people may have gotten inspired by the temporary success in Egypt where the people rose up and over thru their dictator.
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-
To highlight, the start of the invasion was largely bloodless and popular amongst Iraqis due to the ruthlessness of Saddam and the soft power that the US carried at that time.
But of course, that would all change when an incompetent idealistic administration was put in charge of Iraq’s nation building, with gross mismanagement leading to a bloody insurgency and rampart corruption.
Nature adores a vacuum.
The Middle East was ruled by a strong man who smashed things in his way in ugly ways. The timid people just stepped out of his way. The strong stood up and either became more strong or where killed.
That strong man was removed and all of those other strong want to step in to stand in the vacuum of power where those shoes once where.
Put another way: You have a thing that is so bad that if you try to fix it – that thing will crumble. But it is held together by sheer will and personal power. Then that power that held it together is gone – and the system crumbles.
Syria, Libia, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey all of these places are lead by strong men who hold power by invalid means. When they go – everyone who was oppressed comes out because there is a vacuum where that power hold was.
What will be interesting is when Russia(Putin) or China(Xi), or perhaps NorthKorea(Jong) goes – what happens then?
In the west we have a “deep [political] bench” we have plenty of backup with skilled people and a well educated population that will not put up with that nonsense. Our system accepts that there is and will be a change of government every 4 to 6 or at most 10 years.
Libia how long was Kadafi in power?
Mubarak in Egypt?
Erduan – in Turkey?
Sadam in Iraq
The SHAW in Iran
I could go on with others – when these power centers collapse bad things happen because there is nothing to fill the vacuum.
History is full of these examples and history repeats often
The real question is: What did America do that lead to the state of Iraq and the middle east, and how is that behavior ongoing?
If you are interested there is a great podcast called Blowback who’s first season is all about the Iraq war and America’s meddling and the consequences it had!!
Late to the party but there is a great book on this topic, called “The Great War for Civilization” by Robert Fisk.
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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