I think the jist is that this was still successful because if the UN didn't exist we may have already had 7 additional multination wars (that is if the first 2 didn't kill everyone). Of course we don't know for sure if that would have happened.

The data shows a downward trend in interstate conflicts, colonial conflicts, and per capita battle deaths since the 40's. Civil conflicts peaked in the early 90's, but nukes aren't a factor in those.

Source: https://files.prio.org/publication_files/prio/Gates,%20Nyg%C...

There is other research[0] (also recently posted to HN, though it got a lot less traction than Gates and Pinker), that claims this trend may very likely not be there. It's very hard to prove.

[0] http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...

It's a process. The point is that there is far less war going on now than ever before, on a population adjusted basis.

Further to that point, there hasn't been a serious war between major powers in seven decades. One of the longest stretches in recorded history.

Overwhelmingly what we've seen in the way of war deaths since WW2, is in civil war and genocides by Socialist, Communist and Fascist regimes.

Don't forget that the US has had a hand in very many of those wars, and have been responsible for massive amounts of deaths in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

The fact that a law is broken is not a counterexample of the law existing. War was once the default, and lauded. Now it is the exception, and is decried and worked against.

When a war happens we ask ourselves why, and the international community works to try to prevent it the next time. That would be truly alien to a world leader even a couple centuries ago.

Including by the countries supposed to enforce the rule (UN security council: Russia who annexed Crimea, China building illegal islands in the Pacific, US who started wars based on lies for oil..)

Which wars did the US start on a lie for oil?

You could easily argue that most of the conflict the US is currently involved in - and there are many! with boots on the ground or otherwise[0] - have some motive involving petrodollar or other resources.

[0] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-16/us-now-involved-134-w...

So let me see if I have this straight.

Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.

You're saying it was about oil primarily. Yet the US didn't take Iraq's oil. The US didn't even secure an outsized share of contracts related to Iraq's oil. The US vaporized a trillion dollars, along with suffering tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, trying to stop the Iraqi civil war in which Iraqis killed hundreds of thousands of each other.

Simultaneously over that decade the US technologically unlocks its massive shale oil resources, making Middle Eastern oil almost entirely moot strategically. So much so, that the US is now merely about 10% of Saudi oil demand.

And the US got what out of all of that Iraq mess when it comes to oil? The US stuck its military where it shouldn't have been, and it did so for geo-political reasons, not economic reasons. The US was a massive loser economically from that effort to try to weaken Russia, it was an economic disaster. The net 'benefit' over two decades will be perhaps close to a negative two trillion dollars all-in.

> Highly respected, four star general, Wesley Clark says that the Iraq war was about attempting to strip Russian influence out of the Middle East. That the plan was to knock over several of the dictatorships there, which were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia and hostile toward the US and its allies.

> You're saying it was about oil primarily.

Those aren't conflicting explanations; the US is concerned about the friendliness of governments in the region largely because it cares about how they manage oil supplies (both for price and geostrategic reasons like making sure we have access and our enemies do not in a major crisis.)

Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today, and will overwhelmingly be tomorrow. Please explain to me how it was in the US interest to topple Saddam, lose a couple trillion dollars in national treasure, all so China could increase its power and influence by securing critical oil supplies and displace the US influence in the Middle East.

And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.

> Your premise is refuted by the fact that China is the primary customer of Middle Eastern oil today

No, it's not, because the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy.

If we were in a major war with China now and that was true, it would suggest that the policy had been unsuccessful in achieving a key goal, but even then wouldn't refute that that had been the policy goal.

> And when it comes to enemies, neither Iran nor Russia have need of external oil supplies.

Perhaps (though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use) but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.

> the US concern outside of a major war, again, isn't who buys it but pumping and pricing policy

Of course it's about who buys (ie who can supply their economy with the energy it needs). The entire political value of oil is that it's critical to most economies. You keep saying that it's about controlling the oil, the point of that control is to use it for self-benefit. If the US were doing what you're claiming, it would be denying oil to China. You say that there is value in being able to deny oil supply to enemies - and then you pretend the US wouldn't have an interest in denying oil supply to China to slow its economic ascension (it obviously would benefit massively if it could partially suffocate China's growth via oil). These are contradictions in your theory, as China swims in Middle Eastern oil supply.

> though maintain any kind of optempo in a major war requires more than just adequate supplies for peacetime consumption, even after the inevitable rationing of non-militart use

Russian and Iranian oil production is drastically beyond their peacetime economic consumption. I can't imagine where you're trying to go with that.

> but even so they do have an interest in having supplies denied to an external enemy like, say, the US. Which motivates a desire to influence other exporters.

You're refuting yourself there. Then why didn't the US deny Chinese access to Iraqi oil? China almost immediately began benefiting immensely from Iraq's oil as production ramped up after the worst of the shutdown. Saudi's primary customer is now China and that is going to get a lot more dramatic in the coming decade. Those two points collapse what you're claiming.

If the US wanted to press an advantage, it would destroy Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil supplies (use an ISIS-like mess), which would hammer China's economy by removing 1/4 to 1/3 of their oil supply. The US is now one of the few major nations that can fully support itself on energy. Instead, the US is actively protecting both Saudi and Iraq, while the largest US rival - China - benefits the most from that protection.

I agree that people probably overestimate the role of oil, but you have to keep in mind that the current world paradigm is not the world paradigm at the time of the Iraq war, and that there are very personal issues involving the Bush dynasty and its connections with the intelligence-executive infrastructure at play as well.

The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.

I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.

It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.

In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.

> vaporized a trillion dollars

It didn't vaporize any money whatsoever, in fact, Halliburton (and many of the hundreds of military strategy companies in the MIC) did quite well with their new economy.

Yes. In fact, it's quite the opposite of vaporizing--it's precipitating cold hard cash into the hands of the few.

You already know which one.

Halliburton share prices from 2003-2005: https://i.imgur.com/UgPNCBg.gif

NY Times article about the division of Iraq oilfields: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/energy-environmen...

That's a false context setup. Show me Halliburton's chart where it collapsed down to $16 in 2008 after the commodity bubble burst.

All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.

Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.

If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.

That graph doesn't show an obvious uptick after the big red "WAR" dot. It's growing fast but seemingly was before just as much. What's it supposed to prove?