Here’s the thing about Iraq, or Palestine, or Libya: what your leaders will do in these countries is what they would do to you if they though it would benefit them.
Israel has long used skunk-water, incredibly foul smelling stuff, on Palestinians.
In the last year they used them on Israelis who were protesting the war (not because they care about Palestinians, because they want the hostages back.)
But that’s minor league.
American elites, when they say, “we have to make hard decisions” always mean by that they have to hurt those below them. A hard decision for them is never about doing something against interest: say cutting their own compensation to keep employees working. Nope.
American and Western elites are predators, and their population are sheep. The cops are, as they say themselves, sheep-dogs. They make sure the population holds still for the shearing, and when necessary, the killing.
Covid is instructive: elites have well ventilated and filtered rooms. They test regularly and keep Covid-positive people away from them. But they don’t make their offices and factories safe by installing the necessary ventilation and filtering available, instead they just force workers to come into unsafe offices. (And no, the pandemic isn’t over.)
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Policy since about 79 has been about deliberately impoverishing the mass of people, while making themselves rich. This isn’t close to in question.
There is no group solidarity between Western elites and those they rule. Never do they lead by example, “we’ll give up private jets to help with climate change and impose a carbon tax on farmers” is something we never hear. I doubt it ever occurs to them that they should sacrifice something.
Through the Gaza war they’ve increasingly cracked down on any sort of protest, and often made protest illegal, with penalties which are more severe than for crimes of violence. This is particularly true in Britain and Germany, but they aren’t alone, simply the vanguard.
Obama ordered the assassination of an American citizen. Multiple American citizens have been killed in Gaza and Lebanon and the US has done nothing.
Police in America steal more money than burglars. They kill and beat people in significant numbers.
And the day they perceive it to be to their benefit to Iraq or Gaza a big chunk of Americans, they’ll do it. Don’t think otherwise.
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.