Destabilization: There and Here

You know Iraq is all our fault, right? Maybe not individually, unless by some fluke one of the governmental authors of that fiasco has stumbled upon this blog. But we, as the USA, our fault. And one of the things that caused the mess has been brought home to roost.

So what did we do? First, go for the neighbor, Iran. We rolled right over their functioning democracy (That's right. You believe we did that?) and deposed their duly elected government and imposed the Shah on them. Much as our news stories of the day glorified him, he was a monster. When they finally dumped him, we decided to arm Iraq, and then just to keep it interesting, plus bring more profits to arms manufacturers, because it always boils down to money after all, we decided to arm Iran too. Yep, we armed both sides. Those are mostly still in play.

ISIS wouldn't be the problem it is today if we hadn't laid the groundwork, first, by arming everybody, and second, by going in and replacing the leaders of their governments. That includes Saddam Hussein. He was awful, but he was a secular leader and kept the fanatics from imposing their cruelty on the rest of the population.  For those of you rooting for the Christians over there, in case you forgot, under his rule they were safe. Jews too. And whichever sect of Islam was the "other" from anybody's point of view.

And we had to go and throw arms into that mess. No, we're not alone in that. Russia did her part. Eventually anybody who could jumped on that bandwagon. Couldn't miss out on their share of the profits.

Here's a little lesson in the difference between strategy and tactics. If your strategy is to destabilize a nation or an area, then your tactic for best effect would be to throw weapons into it. Think about it. If I'm pissed off and want to retaliate, without arms I'm pretty much limited to my fists and knives, or whatever rock I can hoist and throw. Kinda limits the extent of the violence, having the wonderful effect of also limiting the retaliation violence too. At some point it is just too much effort to keep it going at any level above a slow simmer. Life goes on.

If you add arms, my little spat gets blown up (hah!) into something major. I can kill dozens, hundreds, thousands, if not directly then by ruining their ability to support, feed, and shelter themselves because there's nothing left. My spat becomes war and drags everybody in. Life doesn't go on.

What you are seeing all through the Middle East right now is the inevitable result of that decades old decision to arm both sides, and ongoing decisions to keep it up, governmentally or privately. Somebody's getting rich off it all. A lot of Somebodies.

Now, bring that back home. There are forces at work here doing the same thing. It's not another government this time, at least I don't think so. Not unless you go for the idea of corporatocracy being our new wanna-be government, not so far fetched. The rich here are trying to get richer. Since the rich are running massive corporations, the way to accomplish what they want is to cut costs. Thus all the screaming about taxes, about labor costs, about regulations. Hell, we even passed laws requiring them to maximize profits.

They just can't really maximize profits in a stable, informed, educated, middle-class society. If we were that, we'd demand fair wages, sharing business profits via taxes to maintain roads, water, education of the workforce, etc. Slavery, or as close as they can come, works much better for them, or at least in their short-term max-profit world view. If our water gets poisoned, or we can't breathe properly, or our food is tainted, or we don't live past 45 or so, our maximum productive years from their perspective, well, that's no issue for them. We don't need to think to push buttons, so let's kick art out of the schools and lower education levels under the disguise of national standards testing. So long as their trucks can get through, the roads are good enough.

As long as we, our society, is destabilized, we won't fight their tactics to maximize their profits.

Have you noticed the abundance of guns out there? The daily shootings, the crazy laws, the paranoia?

Now ask yourself: just who is destabilizing us?