Iraqi is back to pumping record oil flows and its GDP per capita is already back to being higher than Jordan, Ukraine, Egypt, Indonesia or the Philippines. It's not terribly far away from Colombia or South Africa.
How does that represent Iraq's wealth being transferred to the military industrial complex? The exact opposite happened. The US lost enormous sums of money and also didn't keep or take Iraq's oil (which is the extreme majority of their national wealth). The US has absolutely nothing economically to show for its ridiculously dumb attempt to nation build influence in Iraq.
If the US wanted a forever stable supply of Iraqi oil, Saddam would have happily arranged that, even at an under the (OPEC) table discount.
China will be by far the biggest economic beneficiary of both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're going to partner with the Taliban and mine the heck out of Afghanistan, and they'll buy a lot of Iraqi oil. So what's the premise, we did both wars at the behest of China, because the US is now the puppet of China? I get it, we did it for China for the oil!
In 2019 Iraq exported $74b of crude. $21b of that went to China, $19b went to India. $6b went to the US.
So the US spent trillions of dollars to secure an annual $6b flow of oil, which could have trivially been secured from Saddam (and a lot more than that)? Nope. That's not why the US invaded Iraq at all.
How does that represent Iraq's wealth being transferred to the military industrial complex? The exact opposite happened. The US lost enormous sums of money and also didn't keep or take Iraq's oil (which is the extreme majority of their national wealth). The US has absolutely nothing economically to show for its ridiculously dumb attempt to nation build influence in Iraq.
If the US wanted a forever stable supply of Iraqi oil, Saddam would have happily arranged that, even at an under the (OPEC) table discount.
China will be by far the biggest economic beneficiary of both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're going to partner with the Taliban and mine the heck out of Afghanistan, and they'll buy a lot of Iraqi oil. So what's the premise, we did both wars at the behest of China, because the US is now the puppet of China? I get it, we did it for China for the oil!
In 2019 Iraq exported $74b of crude. $21b of that went to China, $19b went to India. $6b went to the US.
So the US spent trillions of dollars to secure an annual $6b flow of oil, which could have trivially been secured from Saddam (and a lot more than that)? Nope. That's not why the US invaded Iraq at all.