Russian, French and Turkish interventionism in the Middle East and Africa are an order of magnitude smaller but they seem to have accomplished more than the US/NATO did in Afghanistan.
The Iraq war is a complicated beast. The Iraqis I know feel the country improved for the better but US foreign policy on Israel-Palestine and warmongering against Iran (most Iraqis are Shia) has eroded whatever goodwill they had after the fall of Saddam.
Well, because the project isn't warfare as such. The project is wealth transfer from public to private hands via something that looks like war. Yet more socialism for the ultra-wealthy, in other words. In this incentive structure, spending more than needed is the point.
While it wouldn't be true to say that the US hasn't had "military goals" in Afghanistan, I'd make the claim that these were never really the point. Like most of the defense budget, this has been about enriching a specific sector of the American elite, and by that metric they've succeeded tremendously. In fact, judging from the media reaction to the US leaving the past ten days, they seem to have thought it'd last a lot longer than 20 years.
Or in the case of Iraq and the war on terror, wealth transfer from everything and everybody in that region back to the private owners of the military-industrial apparatus.
Iraqi is back to pumping record oil flows and its GDP per capita is already back to being higher than Jordan, Ukraine, Egypt, Indonesia or the Philippines. It's not terribly far away from Colombia or South Africa.
How does that represent Iraq's wealth being transferred to the military industrial complex? The exact opposite happened. The US lost enormous sums of money and also didn't keep or take Iraq's oil (which is the extreme majority of their national wealth). The US has absolutely nothing economically to show for its ridiculously dumb attempt to nation build influence in Iraq.
If the US wanted a forever stable supply of Iraqi oil, Saddam would have happily arranged that, even at an under the (OPEC) table discount.
China will be by far the biggest economic beneficiary of both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're going to partner with the Taliban and mine the heck out of Afghanistan, and they'll buy a lot of Iraqi oil. So what's the premise, we did both wars at the behest of China, because the US is now the puppet of China? I get it, we did it for China for the oil!
In 2019 Iraq exported $74b of crude. $21b of that went to China, $19b went to India. $6b went to the US.
So the US spent trillions of dollars to secure an annual $6b flow of oil, which could have trivially been secured from Saddam (and a lot more than that)? Nope. That's not why the US invaded Iraq at all.
>The US is the only Western nation with the demographics (population size and age), political will, technological capacity, and economic ability to challenge a surging China or resurgent Russia (which inherited the might of the Soviet Union to build off of) on the world stage.
>How many Americans would change their tone on military spending if China or Russia were calling the shots on world issues? On spreading their views on governance or human rights? Or if the balance of power shifted so much that more nations decided it was time for them to get nuclear weapons too (imagine Saudi Arabia getting nukes...)?
This was written in 2017. Man I would love to hear his assessment as to how the US is doing vs China today. So much has transpired since then.
> Why is American warfare so expensive? Russian, French and Turkish interventionism in the Middle East and Africa are an order of magnitude smaller but they seem to have accomplished more than the US/NATO did in Afghanistan.
I’m no apologist for the US, quite the opposite. However if you want a good comparison, compare the how various empires fared in Afghanistan, it’s as close to like-for-like as we will ever get.
The US, Britain and Russia all did miserably. Wasted time, lives and money and they have caused huge harm while losing.
It's exactly as effective as they want it to be. 20 years of siphoning out money from public to private enterprises all in the name of a war on terror.
Russian, French and Turkish interventionism in the Middle East and Africa are an order of magnitude smaller but they seem to have accomplished more than the US/NATO did in Afghanistan.
The Iraq war is a complicated beast. The Iraqis I know feel the country improved for the better but US foreign policy on Israel-Palestine and warmongering against Iran (most Iraqis are Shia) has eroded whatever goodwill they had after the fall of Saddam.