Obviously, but we're comparing apples and oranges here.
- Iraq was never a major oil concern for the US. Perhaps maybe stabilizing global oil prices - but the primary beneficiaries were actually our European and Asian allies.
- We never just "took" the oil for our domestic market (which is what we are basically doing in Venezuela)
- Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.
Similarly we were in Afghanistan for-freaking-ever which had no clear resource benefit or even clear goal.
I would even go so far as to say that for most of the 20th century, America's foreign policy interventions are more easily attributed to our failed role as "World Police". We were brought into Iran because of the British, we were in Vietnam because of the French. Kuwait because of Saudi Arabia. Korea and Lebanon directly.
So while yes you could paint a broad brush and say all of this indirectly was to expand America's "empire", but as an international alliance where America carries the big stick, the US actually carried out a lot more on behalf of the overall alliance than one would realize.
That alliance that the US is now trying to dissolve.
alt Hacker News
Obviously, but we're comparing apples and oranges here.
- Iraq was never a major oil concern for the US. Perhaps maybe stabilizing global oil prices - but the primary beneficiaries were actually our European and Asian allies.
- We never just "took" the oil for our domestic market (which is what we are basically doing in Venezuela)
- Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.
Similarly we were in Afghanistan for-freaking-ever which had no clear resource benefit or even clear goal.
I would even go so far as to say that for most of the 20th century, America's foreign policy interventions are more easily attributed to our failed role as "World Police". We were brought into Iran because of the British, we were in Vietnam because of the French. Kuwait because of Saudi Arabia. Korea and Lebanon directly.
So while yes you could paint a broad brush and say all of this indirectly was to expand America's "empire", but as an international alliance where America carries the big stick, the US actually carried out a lot more on behalf of the overall alliance than one would realize.
That alliance that the US is now trying to dissolve.