I'd argue that the invasion of Iraq benefited plenty of neoconservative aims:

1) eliminating a military threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel

2) placing hundreds of military outposts on Iran's doorstep

3) destabilizing Iran and Syria by empowering militant groups dormant under Saddam to re-arm and try to establish a Caliphate in Syria.

4) awarding trillions in no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and a slew of arms manufacturers and private military contractors who could operate free of the burdensome rules of the Geneva Conventions. Halliburton received so much business that they moved their HQ to Dubai.

One point: The Geneva convention applies to all of the military forces a country uses: standing, conscripts, contractors, etc.

If that were true I wonder how much the emergence of fentanyl influenced the decision to pull out of Afghanistan

I've been saying since at least 2013 that fentanyl is a chemical attack against the US by China. I've been repeatedly downvoted for that statement.

Indeed. I believe it is retribution for the Opium Wars. Sure the US isn't the UK, but it's the successor Anglo empire and is obstructing China's return to their rightful place as global hegemon.

I think Xi Jinping and his CPC wish to inflict a Century of Humiliation on the West, or at least on the members of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Russia and Hungary, beware.

Unfortunately this game only takes one willing participant. We'd better get our heads in the game and begin to play. And we need to prepare for a proper hot war, too, although that's already well understood and those preparations are already well underway.

I was into the whole research chemical thing from maybe 2005 to 2011. People on message boards were doing like $30k+ group buys to get Chinese labs to synthesize new stuff. It was a really interesting time with a lot of money to be made and new chemicals to experience. I started hearing horror stories about people ODing on fentanyl and fentanyl analogues in 2011ish from middle men mixing up orders and mislabeling chemicals. That sketched me out enough that I didn't want anything to do with it anymore. It was very easy to buy fentanyl straight from Chinese labs until at least 2013 but maybe even as late as 2015 or 16. Fentanyl was legal in China until US pressure to ban it and that's when they started sending precursors to Mexico.

> There's considerable evidence

Yet you provide none.

There’s plenty of information out there, books of it even https://youtu.be/TL7qT0goYLw

Yet you link to a YouTube video of questionable provenance. Not one book reference.

Forgive me for just filing this in the ‘conspiracy theory nonsense’ folder.

This is a HN comment section. You can ask for which claims you want evidence for, instead of low quality trolling.

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/6416/afghanistans-opium-p...

You said: “There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production”, yet you provide nothing to back up your claim. It is not trolling to point that out.

Your link to some stats on levels of poppy production does not support your conspiracy theory.

It's a pattern for this user unfortunately.

> There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production

There's a lot more evidence and reason to believe that the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because the Bush Administration realized that, despite their initial inclinations, they couldn't sell a war on Iraq as a response to 9/11 without first making a visible effort that was more tangibly connected to the organization that actually carried out the attacks.