Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day.

Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day. archive

  • phoneymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
    524·
    1 month ago

    I agree with your entire comment except the end.

    We shouldn’t have attacked Iraq or Afghanistan. The premise for the war in Iraq was that Saddam was harboring weapons of mass destruction. That was a flat out lie. The Iraq war and the power vacuum it created led to the creation of ISIS.

    Afghanistan had elements of Al-Qaeda present. The Taliban tolerated them. We should have hunted bin Laden there and hit Al-Qaeda where we could find them, but toppling the government was mostly useless and we ended up needing to get the hell out of there after spending $2 trillion dollars, only to have the Taliban return.

    Should we have attacked Saudi Arabia though? Absolutely. We should have actually done regime change there and maybe even helped ourselves to the oil revenues to cover the costs of 9/11 and our military. Our presence would’ve also helped modernize their medieval society in ways beneficial to the Middle East.

    • daltotron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      251·
      1 month ago

      I agree with your entire comment except the end.

      I’m not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we’ve ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they’re still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I’d probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I’d imagine.

      In totality though I’m not really sure to what extent it’s in the US’s best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.

      • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        41·
        1 month ago

        I’m not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we’ve ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they’re still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects.

        Not disputing anything you said about Vietnam, but we did alright with Japan and South Korea.

        • daltotron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 month ago

          I mean we did okay-ish with japan, and that was in the immediate post-ww2 period. There was a bunch of gaishas for a while that were complaining (iirc) about sexual assault from american troops, the nation immediately in the postwar period was fomented with a ton of nationalism and we didn’t really do a great job of undoing that. Though, their trajectory nowadays is pretty good, and it’s not like you can really blame all of that on the american occupation, really.

          South korea, though, even though I don’t know as much, I’m pretty sure we fucked up that one, since that war basically never ended and nowadays the country is a late stage hypercapitalist hellscape where plastic surgery to make you look more western is incredibly common along with the prevalence of cults and a wealth disparity that’s pretty US-adjacent.

          So I dunno if we did super well on those. Probably better than, say, Iraq, but I think our trajectory overall has been on a pretty consistent downwards trend since ww2.