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What do you think were the objectives in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the prolonged interference in the middle east as a whole?

• nickik 10y ago
  Its a hard question. The original military involvement start with Carter and the Carter Doctrine, declaring the Golf as a vital US interest. From there is spiral out of control quite a bit and its to long a story for this comment. Lets jump to the 'current' wars. Afghanistan was pretty clear cut. AQ was there, the US wanted to kick them out and install a regime that would prevent further use of Afghanistan at a base, so the Taliban had to go. There is little argument about this. Iraq is the real question. I have spent quite a bit of time on this. Its really a mystery because it simply does not make sense. There were a combination of ideas that 'infected' a small group of top military and political people. Iraq was actually the just a first step of a grand policy to rework the middle east. You can say about Bush and friends what you like, but at least they had a strategy. They basically wanted to demonstrate US power and US ability to install liberal democracy. This would split the Iran-Syria-Hezebolla Axis. It would pressure Iran and be helpful to Israel. With this success in hand, they could use soft power way more effectively to 'control' weak regimes like Sudan. The idea was, join the US and if you don't you will get hammer in the ground and replaced with a democracy. This strategy was of course thrown overboard when the Republicans lost the congress, Bush dumped Rumsfeld over board with it. Since then they are back to having no strategy and a ad-hock fire brigade style of policy making.