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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4286 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Trump had said US should have taken (meaning stolen) Iraqi oil on multiple occasions.

I mean, maybe we should have. It's hard to imagine a counterfactual world where Iraq had a thriving US-financed and operated oil infustry employing locals and generating economic activity/tax revenue is worse for the Iraqi people than what they currently have.

A western-backed petrol state is vastly preferable to a failed state, for essentially everyone except the jihadis. Just ask the Kuwaitis.

Except then you're basically committing to a permanent military presence wherever oil is produced, which is throughout the country. You may be okay with that, but selling the war as an effective permanent takeover was never going to be politically tenable. We would have had to commit to nation building as a side effect.

I mean Iraq is, currently, a petrostate. That is the main sector of their economy. Making it US owned is… very possibly not an improvement.

The main thing that I got out of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan is that most of the people in Islamic countries really are very devout muslims, who want the same in their leaders. There's a reason that most of the Arab Spring countries turned into Islamic theocracies - people want those, they don't want to be ruled by The Great Satan or by Moloch. Secularism in the Middle East is and always has been a project of the sultan and/or the army, it's pretty much never bottom up. Be careful before you make assumptions.

I'm not sure if it's an assumption about what Iraqis wanted in 2003, so much as a claim that after a generation of two of being ruled by a secular US-propped government they'd learn to like it and the islamic death-cult would die out. Which other experiments eg Afghanistan have of course shown to be… optimistic at best. But it's something, and it's probably the best we've got if you don't want to despair of human nature.

It not like Iraq isn't producing oil anyway (top 7th in the world), that's not one of their many problems.

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