Iraq and Afghanistan and other places that the U.S. government have been interfering in have been destroyed because of U.S. intervention, but that wasn’t necessarily because of a series of mistakes or ignorance.
In many cases that was the plan. …
Many of the crimes that were committed were premeditated. –Raed Jarrar

Raed Jarrar speaks to an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C. on July 3, 2006. (Flickr / Matthew Bradley)
In the most recent episode of Act Out! Eleanor Goldfield sat down for an extended interview with activist and Middle East policy analyst Raed Jarrar.
Raed Jarrar isn’t just an expert on US/Middle East policy, he’s lived through it. Growing up in Iraq, he witnessed the 2003 bombing and occupation that completely destroyed his country. Now, as an American citizen and policy advisor, he’s working to shift both paradigms and policy, for the sake of both of his countries.
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Exactly. Every time some dogooder tries to exonerate the US and its “leaders” for “unintended consequences” of their insane “War on Terror” I roll my eyes and say “Really? What a crock.”
Arch Neocon Michael Ledeen: “One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror.”
Again: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
And then there are the “defense industries” whose war profiteering enriches the very lawmakers who decide to fund these wars, lawmakers in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Israel, etc. Neither the War Industries’ executives nor their shareholders nor the legislators who empower them give a dam how those munitions are used, so long as they are used, to draw down the stock, to force new purchases, to keep the gravy train rolling.
War is a Racket whose cost is measured in human lives and profits in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a racket that benefits the very few at great cost to the rest of us.