When speaking about the war in Iraq being inevitable....well yes it was for the most part. Not because Iraq was a threat to us directly, but more so indirectly. I'm at school., so you'll pardon if I gloss over a bunch of shit in this post but here is the basic jist of everything;
1. As a nation, we naturally feel inclined to protect ourselves and our interests with any means necessary. Every nation does, it's the way the system works.
2. Because of the above, and the way our particular nation is set up, we require a stable Europe in order to function properly.
3. A stable Europe needs oil.
4. The two biggest growing countries, with the fastest growing populations are India and China. Both are also in the process of industrializing after recovering from Europe fucking them in the ass for decades/centuries.
5. Both these nations are also militarily aggressive, ala #1.
6. They are also armed with nuclear weapons.
7. Because of the scarcity of resources and their immediate proximity to them, conflict over said resources is very likely.
8. This means, that indirectly, the ME is a security threat to our interests under its current conditions. It's also why we are more concerned about THEM having WMDs than N.Korea.
9. All this being true, it has been in our interest to try and create liberal democratic nations similar to our own.
10. Previous efforts at propping up dictators doesn't work as well as we would like (as evidenced by a whole host of history in the regoin)
11. Therefore, a new strategy of making revolutionaries was/is tried. This leads us to Iraq.
12. Insurgency grows and spreads to neighboring nations, along with filtered down ideas of democracy, equality and blah blah blah.
13. Where we are now, the Arab Spring.
Now we get into the future and even more theory (as if the current points aren't theoretical enough).
14. New ME democratic nations eventually build themselves into a stable society, one that is also democratic and on better terms with us than the past 60ish years.
15. Said nations also are on better terms with each other, as years of internal struggle make external war even less attractive.
16. India and China are less inclined to fight over and attempt to control scarce resources, knowing that the ME is relatively united, has 1-2 generations of successful insurgency fighters as a significant part of the population, and as a democratic and friendly nation, can count on US military support.
17. Nuclear crisis averted, joy to the fucking world.
Now, as I said I'm glossing over A LOT in this post. Part of that is because I don't have time to go further into detail. Another part is because, well, there isn't as much evidence for this sort of thing, obviously. I'm getting all this from private conversations I had with some people in the upper echelons of the intelligence community in 2007-2008 and my own connect the dots based on past US policies.
