Where does Iraq and the Middle East go from here?

[SamuelRSmith]

I've been having a bit of a rethink, recently, about military, and war, in general.

As those of you who read my posts here regularly, you will know that I am opposed to, and distrust, Government in just about every aspect. And yet I, like most people with my political mindset, tend to make an exception for military and foreign policy. I mean, this (somewhat) makes sense, the typical libertarian point of view is that if there is any role for Government, it's defence and foreign affairs. But what's going on in Iran is causing me to, let's just say, pause for thought.

Don't get me wrong. I have not supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for a while, now. But, my reasons were different. My main issues with these wars (and others - Pakistan, Yemen, Libya) were cost, and the fact that they were just poor foreign policy, that will probably lead to more attacks on the West in the future.

There have been around 140,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Nobody knows the real number, because nobody cares enough to find out. That's a big number, 140,000. And yet, how many people reading that felt the least bit upset or disturbed by that figure? Fathers, mothers, grandparents, children... dead. What about the thousands more who have been crippled? Or displaced? The families that have been broken up? What about the civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya?

People just don't care about them. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered or crippled, or had their lives destroyed by our forces. And yet, we just don't care. For us, it's just a "fact of war". We have been turned into stone by the establishment who don't want us to feel bad for the killings, because if we feel bad, we might start questioning our establishment overlords.

And it's the establishment that are drawing up the propaganda for the next war. It's almost hysterical how little people have learned: the case for Iran war is even more ludicrous than that for Iraq. In Iraq, at least the intelligence agencies said that there were weapons of mass destruction. For Iran, we're told that they might be working on some, and yet people are falling for it moreso than ever before.

/Sorry if this post seems disjointed, I started talking to a housemate mid-post, and the conversation lasted a couple of hours. I lost my thread/