The Iraq War: What Happened? (Cost and Reasons for the Iraq War and Misconceptions about US Military Failures)

Here is a video by the great YouTuber Hakim. I do not agree with everything, but he makes some great points. In this post, I would argue that the war in Iraq was not a failure, and it’s only a misconception created by the people behind it. Let’s discuss the real reason for what happened.

First, before I argue my point, Hakim mentions debt in his video. To his point, I would like to add a short video from a lecture by Michael Parenti that I have posted before:

Given that the US is borrowing two billion dollars a day to keep this empire going, do you ever see us running out of money?

“You mean the rule is running out of money? Well, that’s the goal. The goal is to run out of a lot of money.

Bush is building up this massive deficit. Now, that’s very functional. What he’s doing is borrowing money from the people he should be taxing. He’s cutting the taxes of the rich, and then he’s borrowing from them. A national debt like that is an upward redistribution of income. We have to pay for that debt. That seven trillion dollars belongs to us.

Every year, this government has been running a deficit. What’s a deficit? A deficit is when the government spends more money than it takes in in taxes. How can it do that? It does that by turning around and borrowing money to make up the difference to pay the deficit.

Who does it borrow from? It borrows from rich bankers, big rich foreign investors, and others. A small portion of that comes from the people themselves. If you buy savings bonds or something, you’ve got a little piece—a tiny little piece—of this enormous debt.

Who has to pay that debt? The national debt is the accumulation of these yearly deficits; that’s what the debt is.

So, what you’re getting is this enormous debt that we, working people, owe to the rich creditors. It’s an upward redistribution to them.

The other function of that enormous debt is that it becomes an excuse for not having a big public sector. You can cut human services. He’s already saying that we’ve got to cut because we have such a big deficit. ‘I want to reduce the deficit.’ He’s already cutting 50 billion dollars from ‘luxury’ things like infant feeding programs and disability insurance—frills that we don’t really need. Certainly, he and members of his class don’t need those things, so they don’t care. We’re spending and spending and spending—that’s one of the goals.”

This explains the huge debt caused by the Iraq War. It was a simple upward redistribution of money.

Now, regarding the so-called failure of the US in Iraq, let’s think about it for a second. I think no one would argue with me that the real reason behind the invasion of Iraq was not WMDs or democracy, but oil. Now that we know our goal was oil, we can’t simply steal it. So, what can the West do? After winning a military conflict, Western corporations, of course, will privatize the oil, transferring some of its profits to the West, but we will still have to pay market price for it. We can’t simply steal it, and we want to make more money.

But what if, after winning the conflict, we make sure to destabilize the area to ensure that terrorist organizations will be created and take control of land and some of the oil fields? Remember ISIS? How did they finance themselves? Oil.

There are a lot of stories like this, acknowledging the sale of oil. None of the stories connect it fully to our Western corporations, but let’s be honest with ourselves. We all know very well that our international capitalist corporations bought it, and that was the whole purpose of the ISIS state. Since we can’t just steal Iraq’s oil, we can let terrorist organizations form, even help them, and ensure they take control of the land, especially the oil fields. This way, they can produce illegal oil and then sell it to Western corporations at a discount, say 50% of the market price. This allows Western corporations to effectively steal half of the oil they were buying from ISIS, because if not for ISIS, they would have had to buy oil from the official legal government of Iraq at market price.

Now, imagine we win a military conflict in Iraq and instead of destabilizing the area, we truly establish a legitimate government in Iraq. Our Western corporations would have to pay 100% of the market price for oil from Iraq. Just imagine how much less profit our Western corporations would gain. All those years ISIS existed, our Western corporations could buy oil illegally for 50% of the market price and then sell it for 100%. Imagine how much less money the West would earn. ISIS and the failure of the Iraqi state was not a failure of the US, but an achievement—because that was the goal, and they have achieved it.

As Christian Parenti said in one of the videos I posted (about Trump, but it’s applicable also to Iraq):

Um, yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, pulling back from all the details, it’s like they also had a problem, which is what do you tell the public?

“Like, how do you explain this to the children? Are you going to say, ‘Okay folks, this guy’s nuts and he threatens the American Empire’? You know, the American Empire is this very important thing for reproducing this system that is, you know, contolling people all over the world economically, right? This is how this system of inequality that you all experience is reproduced, and we have to maintain it in the interests of Corporate America and capitalist ruling classes globally. You can’t say that publicly to voters, so they come up with a digestible narrative for the audiences—for the citizens, who they treat as children—which is like, ‘He’s in with the bad guys,’ right? I mean, otherwise, what are they going to do? They have to come up with some reason to hate this guy, and unlike Trump, they can’t tell the truth, right? They can’t say, ‘This is not a security business,’ right? These are public expenses. We tax you, the American citizens, to fund this incredible Empire, and then Corporate America gets access to cheap labor and cheap natural resources all over the world. That system is very important to the donor class; therefore, we’re going to maintain it, and you’re going to keep paying for it with your taxes. And that’s why you can’t have free healthcare, higher education, etc. They can’t say that, so they come up with a kind of Marvel comic, spy novel story about how he went to the Soviet Union as it was beginning to collapse in the late ’80s to build a hotel, and therefore, the Russians put the zap on him.”

The same applies to Iraq. They also had a problem, which is what do you tell the public? How do you explain this to the children? Are you going to say, “We are going to destabilize the area, promote and support terrorists who cut people’s heads off, and make sure they take control over oil fields so that we can later buy oil from them illegally at a discount to make a profit”? They can’t say that, so they came up with the story about WMDs and then the narrative of evil Islamic terrorists and the clash of civilizations.

All this is pretty important to me because the Iraq War was the event that woke me up to the truth about the world. It started during the occupation of Iraq around 2004–2006, almost two decades ago. I was watching Western coverage, and things did not make sense, so I started watching Al Jazeera on the internet while it was still a legitimate news source. I saw US Marines who had orders to go in the middle of the night to strangers’ houses with guns drawn, putting bags over people’s heads and kidnapping them from their families without providing them or their families with any information. They were doing it all the time. One of the US Marines said he didn’t understand these orders and they made no sense; he also said that if someone was doing to him what he was doing to Iraqis, he would join a terrorist organization too. Those orders didn’t make sense to him because he assumed the US was there to stabilize the area and bring peace and democracy. If that were true, then those orders would make no sense and look like mistakes. But if you understand what I wrote before, those orders make perfect sense—they fueled terrorist organizations like ISIS by pushing people into their arms, and we needed them to steal Iraq’s oil.

People who own this world are not stupid, and instead of believing they made a mistake, ask yourself, “Cui bono?”