Libya basically suffered the same fate thanks to Gaddafi deciding to die hard up to doing crazy shit like bombing his own capital city.
Libya suffered because it was a degree of threat to western interest.
No that's not really correct. Gaddafi had been cozying up to western interests for decades, and in 2010 he did a deal to sell off most remaining Libyan government corporations to foreign multinationals. Basically he'd sold out, and was on the cusp of becoming exactly what we
like - a free-market-friendly dictator, instead of the socialist dictator he started out as. Part of the backdrop to the revolution is that in 2000-2010 large sectors of the Libyan economy had already been privatized, leading to a situation with about 30% unemployment (which is basically the effective goal of privatization - to raise prices, thus reducing service demand, allowing the buyer to sack workers and make a profit). This is stuff that makes your populace very unhappy, but western interests are actually in favor of such economic "reforms". Sure, we had to disown him when the shit hit the fan just like they did with Mubarak in Egypt, but he was actually doing exactly what western interests wanted him to do. The fact is, he was about to sell us a lot of stuff, but without a dictator to maintain security, the value of the investments there is much lower. We didn't want that.
The Iraq War was a different matter: USA invades, spends trillions of dollars, Bush-Administration friendly war profiteers suck up billions. Basically, they invaded and looted a country, but the actual profit was from gouging US taxpayers, not extracting value from Iraq itself. But they had to pump in a lot of tax money for every $ that their friends were siphoning off. If you think any of the missing money in Iraq was an accident, did I mention that Bush/Cheney hand-picked the "auditors" for the Iraq reconstruction fund, but they weren't "auditors". They weren't even "accountants". They didn't even have an "office". It was
one guy who ran multiple companies out of a suburban home, and was mainly known for kitchen renovations. I kid you not. Even the senate investigators are saying this. Over $12 billion these guys were supposed to be overseeing
disappeared, but when you realize they literally made a special effort to put Mickey Mouse in charge of the vault, you begin to think, this can't have been an accident. Some high-up people in the Bush Administration went to special efforts to ensure that nobody with knowledge of accounting went anywhere near those books.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1394778 times)