The initial government was pro-American, but the consequence of pushing a country to have democratic elections is that they sometimes elect people that you don't like.

When you want a country to be free and democratic, you can't also tell them who to elect. You have to choose one or the other. The United States has often chosen the latter while pretending to want the former, but at least with Iraq they seem to be mostly hands off (in recent years).

> The initial government was pro-American, but the consequence of pushing a country to have democratic elections is that they sometimes elect people that you don't like.

I don't the right prior here is "elections = real democracy", for cases like Iraq. The US has long history of installing "democratic" governments that are not actually democratic, but rather military states who violently suppress the people, but support US interests. The list of countries where this has borne out is long, but if you are interested, an easy place to start would be Cold War era South America (Guatemala and El Salvador being two straightforward examples).

Ironically whole thing started with CIA staged double coup(first one did not work apparently) in Iran during 1953(declassified recently). It was so successful that they copy-pasted it to LATAM and elsewhere. [1]

Interesting fact: Kermit Roosevelt Jr. a grandson of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, played the lead role in the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, in August 1953. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt_Jr.

After World War I the British redrew the map of the middle east pretty arbitrarily after defeating the Ottoman Turks founding modern Iraq. It wasn't really guaranteed in the first place to include people who like each other.

It was far from arbitrary.

The British drew the map specifically so that they could use the local tensions to divide and conquer.

We're still suffering because of that.

I'm totally in agreement with you, and yet I'm still saddened that people fall prey to this trick which they have in their power to fix, by learning to forgive and live together in harmony and piece. The tragedy is how hard it is for people to come together and collaborate in good faith. And when that truth is exploited it's even more sad.

According to Wikipedia the Muslim population of the country is split 64–69% Shia and 29-34% Sunni.

The Sunni minority once ruled but now the Shia majority rule and the government is said to be aligned with Shia-majority Iran.

> The United States has often chosen the latter

Seems like it's usually a government that's popular with its people that gets overthrown and replaced by a "democratic" government.

The incumbent government is usually popular because it's a totalitarian regime where the people aren't given a choice.

The opposite is often true. For instance, in Guatemala and Chile the US helped overthrow democratic governments and installed totalitarian regimes.

To be fair, they weren't totalitarian. That's absurdly overstating things. North Korea or Khmer Rouge Cambodia were totalitarian governments.

The Khmer Rouge is an interesting example, as it was a left-wing totalitarian government that the USA supported[0], albeit often at arms length. It was part of the geopolitics at the time, as the USA was aligned with the PRC and the Khmer Rouge against the Soviet bloc. A lot of it was also a petty vendetta against Vietnam, as arming the Khmer Rouge was a way to get back at Vietnamese Communists for winning the Vietnam War.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...

From the Wikipedia article on the Pinochet regime [1]:

> The regime was characterized by the systematic suppression of political parties and the persecution of dissidents to an extent unprecedented in the history of Chile. Overall, the regime left over 3,000 dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners, and drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile.

From the Wikipedia article on Carlos Castillo Armas [2]:

> Upon taking power Castillo Armas, worried that he lacked popular support, attempted to eliminate all opposition. He quickly arrested many thousands of opposition leaders, branding them communists. Detention camps were built to hold the prisoners when the jails exceeded their capacity. Historians have estimated that more than 3,000 people were arrested following the coup, and that approximately 1,000 agricultural workers were killed by Castillo Armas's troops in the province of Tiquisate. Acting on the advice of Dulles, Castillo Armas also detained a number of citizens trying to flee the country. He also created a National Committee of Defense Against Communism (CDNCC), with sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the next few years, the committee investigated nearly 70,000 people. Many were imprisoned, executed, or "disappeared", frequently without trial.

Those don't sound totalitarian to you?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castillo_Armas

That's not totalitarianism though. Since we're quoting Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

"Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian ones. The latter denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. "[The] authoritarian state [...] is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty".[8] Authoritarianism "does not attempt to change the world and human nature".[8] In contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens."

So Chile and Guatemala were Authoritarian, but not Totalitarian. The practical difference is that an Authoritarian Chilean government kills 3,000 people while the Totalitarian Khmer Rouge kills 1.5 to 2 million of its own people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge

"According to a 2001 academic source, the most widely-accepted estimates of excess deaths under the Khmer Rouge range from 1.5 million to 2 million,"

In North Korea, it's hard to estimate because it's a closed society with tight control over information:

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP10.HTM

"Perhaps from 710,000 to slightly over 3,500,000 people have been murdered, with a mid-estimate of almost 1,600,000. But these figures are little more than educated guesses"

Saying they are the same thing is ridiculous and really soft pedals how insane some communist regimes were.

There is no defense of the Pinochet era. I believe that his predecessor tragically abused governance though, seizing control over so many lives, there and abroad.

I feel this is such important context for what followed. It raised such a fervor of hatred toward the communist political body. I still believe this was theft of property from people's families and estates built over many generations of effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuskovic_plan#Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Salvador_Allende...

The bounds of civility had been trampled and vanished. The violent retaliations which followed were outright disgusting.

I'm interested in some examples.

the ones that come readily to my mind like Iran and Chile don't quite fit that mold.

But Maliki was America’s choice while also being clearly pro-Shia. Or are you talking about the transitional government?

But the people are now protesting the Iranian favoring government?

useful quick watch:

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2019/10/ira...

> When you want a country to be free and democratic, you can't also tell them who to elect.

Wasn't that what happened in Egypt?

The hands off approach to Iraq is exactly how we got ISIS btw...

No it isn’t. The US invasion that threw out out Saddam’s government is how we got ISIS.

Half these Pro-Americans used to hide in Iran before the war, America got outplayed when it comes to the Iraqi government lol

1. USA ousts Saddam Hussein, and is obligated to help Iraq transition to a democratic government (because they invasion was done under the pretext of liberating a country from a mad dictator with weapons of mass destruction, instead of the commonly cited argument of securing resources for the American empire).

2. USA backs a candidate and initially gets a government elected that is favorable to the USA. However, these politicians turn out to be kind of scummy and screw up just about everything.

3. Iran realizes that elections can be influenced (they watched the USA influence the first election), and having lots of paramilitary type forces that are trained in information operations, decides to capitalize. They flood across the porous border to spread propaganda (the current scumbags in government make it so the Iranian propaganda doesn't even have to lie, it just has to point out how much the current guys suck).

4. Iraqi citizens, growing sick of the crappy politicians they elected initially, start listening to the propaganda and elect a government friendly to Iran. This is the first time this has happened in a long time, Iraq has not been allies with Iran for several decades.

5. End result- USA invades, eventually loses influence to Iran. The global hegemony USA got outplayed by a regional hegemony because they backed unethical and incompetent sellouts rather than finding a good candidate.

Standing between Saudi Arabia and Iran was Saddam Hussein and his military. By removing him it created a power vacuum that has been filled by various groups over time.

The different election results in Iraq over the years now point to a chess game between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional control.

Now instead of Iraq standing between the other two, it's serving as a way to create conflict where the two may eventually fight each other like the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s.

If the U.S. does not get involved in this scenario then the long term strategic outcome of the 2003 Iraq war might be seen differently. On the other hand, if Iran wins and becomes more powerful, the Iraq war will look even worse.

Which is exactly what was predicted:

"That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you've got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq." -- Dick Cheney

Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Cheney the one that basically pushed the war? When is this quote from?

From the Wikipedia article:

> Following the US invasion of Iraq, Cheney remained steadfast in his support of the war, stating that it would be an "enormous success story",[90] and made many visits to the country. He often criticized war critics, calling them "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while US soldiers died in Iraq. In response, Senator John Kerry asserted, "It is hard to name a government official with less credibility on Iraq [than Cheney].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney#Iraq_War

It's a quote after the first Gulf War.

> instead of the commonly cited argument of securing resources for the American empire).

I'm sorry but there are very few "citations" that state that the war was about securing resources for the American "empire". It was primarily about exactly the stated reasons and there is a popular and uncited belief that it was about oil. If you have some scholarly articles that state that it was completely about oil I'd love to see them.

As someone alive and paying attention to that period in time, I got the impression the "for oil" thing was generally hyperbole never explicitly stated but probably loosely true right since the VP was an oil guy.

Except that American oil companies didn't get any benefit so how does that make any sense? If we are willing to accept the evidence that oil companies in the US didn't meaningfully benefit, doesn't that whole argument kind of seem silly?

It's bad enough that we invaded under pretenses that really really really should have been obviously incorrect at the time, with no plan, just... I don't know. It seems unnecessary to even bother linking it to oil. It was evil. It was stupid.

> Except that American oil companies didn't get any benefit so how does that make any sense? If we are willing to accept the evidence that oil companies in the US didn't meaningfully benefit, doesn't that whole argument kind of seem silly?

Let me start by saying that I don't know much about the history of this period. That being said, I imagine these questions can be answered in two ways:

1. If you don't succeed at doing X, it does not mean that you never intended to do X. Something as chaotic as war will be full of unintended consequences. Maybe American oil companies did not benefit as a result of the war, even though America wanted them to; similar to how ISIS was formed as a result of the war, even though America certainly didn't want it to.

2. I don't think the narrative has ever been that US wanted to directly benefit American oil companies, à la United Fruit Company. The theory is, rather, that the US wanted to ensure that the flow of oil to international markets would not be stopped due to Iraq's actions. Think of it this way: the work US navy does to secure international trading routes is not about directly benefiting US shipping and insurance companies. It is about keeping the wheels of global trade and economy moving. The US companies may benefit from this non-directly, but other nations and companies will benefit from this equally as well. The narrative is not about the US going to war as a colonizer to steal Iraqi oil or get sweetheart deals for US companies. It is that it went to war to ensure continued flow of Iraqi oil to the market and ensure Iraqi government would not throw a wrench in the oil shipments through the region. Ultimately, the reasons for the war, according to this theory, were economical rather than humanitarian or defence-related.

Now I don't know if the above statements are true. I just wanted to bring up the arguments and assertions people make, lest the debate delve into attacking a straw man.

It's the plan cooked up in the late 90s by a think tank called "Project for a New American Century"[0]. The founders were a bunch of reganites whose names pepper the list of high officials of the two Bush presidencies. They believed they could secure the middle east's resources and maintain US hegemony by fighting and winning several concurrent foreign wars. The crazy thing is they laid it all out in their publications three years before 9/11 gave them the political capital to mobilize their plans, and very few people talked about it during the war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...

Edit: relevant entry from the wikipedia article:

in 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times.[22][23] Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.[19][24] Portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region, and emphasizing the potential danger of any weapons of mass destruction under Iraq's control, the letter asserted that the United States could "no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections." Stating that American policy "cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," the letter's signatories asserted that "the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf."[25] Believing that UN sanctions against Iraq would be an ineffective means of disarming Iraq, PNAC members also wrote a letter to Republican members of the U.S. Congress Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott,[26] urging Congress to act, and supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (H.R.4655)[27][28] which President Clinton signed into law in October 1998.

"rather than finding a good candidate."

The idea that any part of the US government could do the sorts of things attributed to this "hegemony" is palpably ridiculous. Especially "find a good candidate". The US has a system for finding a good candidate to run a country, and it found Donald Trump.

If the hegemony that controls everything has been defeated at every turn for generations, clearly someone's talking bollocks. The more rhetoric like this you consume, the less you can appreciate what's going on.

I fail to see how this isn't a win for the US. The Iraqis get a less terrible government no matter who it is and we get to wash our hands of the situation without pissing off Israel or the Saudis.

It's not a win for the USA because one of their enemies gained influence in the region. It's really as simple as that, but:

The invasion also led to the rise of ISIS, which is widely seen as a embarrassment to the USA because they were supposed to be rebuilding a country and ended up allowing a large and deadly terrorist group to form under their noses.

And just to add on, there are literal losses as well. When the Iraqi army retreated from Mosul in 2014, they left behind a bunch of US supplied equipment that ISIS took control of. Iraq has "lost" at least a billion dollars of military equipment in recent years, most of which has been taken by ISIS and enabled terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Mosul https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-lost-track-1-billion-wo...

"Iraq has "lost" at least a billion dollars of military equipment in recent years"

That's...one tenth of one percent of the cost (to the US) of the war.

That’s the wrong measure by a long shot.

If I lose a $2000 rifle, and that rifle is then used to massacre a school, was the loss a mere $2000?

If you lost a thousand $2000 rifles, then the loss was a "mere" 0.1%. Plus or minus an order of magnitude (or two).

I mean, like, you are implying the other 99.9% of spending on the war was harmless or salutary?

No. I’m just saying that they used the money that we lost to gain strength and power, and they used those weapons to kill us and many others. Gaining power and resources provided them with the ability to leverage that and grow even more, and to fund new criminal enterprises. Focusing on the relatively small dollar amount we lost to them initially doesn’t really capture the total loss.

I think this is getting into the same territory as the difference between owing a bank a hundred bucks and a hundred million bucks.

They got in, shot down Saddam, got a bunch of anti-Saddam parties and gave them power... most of them were hiding in Iran or worked with Iran during the Iraq/Iran war they didn't understand the powerplay by Iran, they kept struggling with troops in or out whos who etc... withdrawn and left the incompetent government alone, gave Iran, even more, breathing space to take over

America waged war based on information provided by a Iraqi minister, who was later found to be working for Iranian interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Chalabi

IRGC had also announced the Syria as its 35th province.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2013/08/27/iran-s-unwavering-s...

IRGC and Russian bombing had driven out most of the Sunni's from Southern Syria towards north Syria, close to Turkish borders. and Iran is repopulating the land with Shias from allover from Afghanistan to Lebanon.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/13/irans-syria-pr...

IRGC has sort of created a contiguous Shia controlled land mass from Iran, Iraq, Syria to Lebanon. Some geopolitical observers I follow, expect the next will be in Afghanistan, with Afghani Shias against Pakistan controlled Sunni Talibans, as soon as US withdraws from Afghanistan.

The Iraqi elections are democratic (somewhat? I don’t know the level of Iranian influence) and not controlled by the USA.

"Democratic" is a duplicitous, ambiguous word:

- to the people, it means a government that is less corrupt and more accountable to do the people's work; a semi-meritocracy.

- in diplomatic circles, it means whatever Americans and their rich owner-class want. There aren't very many democratic countries allowed; they're usually small and don't have a resource curse.

Iraq is an example of country with government that "Americans and their rich owner-class" definitely didn't want. It's democratic in the actual sense of the word:

-- It's a government that got majority of the vote.

This has little to do with corruption/accountability, iraqis tend to vote along sectarian lines. There are more shia, they are better organized, they win.

the shia are also protesting fwiw

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/iraqi-police-open-fir...

On the ground it might be more helpful to think of Pro-Saudi vs. Pro-Iran rather than involving America directly - those two political hegemonies are much more relevant to locals.

The initial goal was set by the policy makers who understand "unknown unknown" very well, along with most mainstream media journalists who share the same ideology/beliefs/cult. However knowing "unknown unknown" prohibit them from knowing "unknown unknown unknown". So the the final result doesn't align with initial intentions.

The same mistake is repeated again and again, even today.

Probably a bit of “honne & tatemae”