That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface regarding the USA’s rather shady dealings in the region, orchestrating the overthrow of democratically elected governments, installing brutal dictators, helping orchestrate the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait then using that invasion as a pretext to launch Desert Storm. All against the endless whining question “Why do they hate us so much???”.

I have to say, I have a +/- perception of Michael Moore and I totally disagree with him a good part of the time but last night he was on some show with Ali Velshi and what he had to say about this Irangate shit was so succinctly correct that I was impressed.

He reminded everyone that Iran has never attacked us. They purposely avoided casualties the other day with their strikes in Iraq; it was we who started the whole mess back in the early 1950s by taking their democracy away from them and making sure they don't get it ever since, yet they try to avoid war with us. And we keep calling them the evil of the world and insist they live the way WE think they should while supporting attacks from others in the region. And still, they are trying to avoid war with us, things were going well until I-MF45 showed up.

We're the ones who need regime change.

As long as it doesn’t involve Tulski Gabbard! 😳

he has a page at thirdworldtraveler.com. Saved my sanity during the Bush years.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/William_Blum.html

Written because every election year Iran is rolled out to scare or thrill the right wing voters. Or so it seems.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2012/1/17/1055597/-

Howard Zinn’s book History of America makes it clear the we installed brutal leaders worldwide and built this country on the native & slave blood soaked land.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man exposes the corporations behind the scenes pushing for assignations and regime changes.

The Dulles brothers & Kissinger geopolitics were ruinous in the long run in many ways.

People call themselves patriotic yet fail to understand and exercise their civic duty.

Blowback is inevitable!

opium so that they could get hold to buy tea from India.

They have oil. WE want that oil. The rich greedy people in the US want to be even richer, and WARS are a great way to get rich. Just send other people's young family members to fight and come back in body bags, or dismembered. Just read that the old politicians are coming out on TV, supporting this action, since they are lobbyists for defense contractors. Joe Lieberman is one. Cheney was on TV the other day, looking like death warmed over. He was never one to shy away from any war that HE could profit from. "We the people" have zero say in what happens in this present government. We are just pawns. Pay taxes, so the first family of cretins can drain the
treasury, and what is left will go to make WAR.

Blundering incompetence.

We conspired to overthrow a democratically elected prime minister, Mosaddegh, and installed the leader of our choosing in his place. America’s hands are far from clean in the Middle East and we have been playing dirty ever since so private oil and gas companies can rake in their $billions in private profits.

The Bin Laden family, who was allowed to leave the US when no other aircraft were allowed to fly. Yeah, I remember. "American Adventurism." That's all it is. Our troops and vets deserve(ed) so much more. Like the truth for once?

Thank you for posting.

A bit easier to read: Aubrey Bailey's ‘Clear As Mud’:

"Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle-East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in its fight against Islamic State (IS/ISIL/ISIS). We don’t like IS but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia whom we do like. We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

“We don’t like Iran, but the Iranian government supports the Iraqi gov’t against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting our other enemies, whom we don’t want to lose, but we don’t our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

“If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And, all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out – do you understand now?”

We only bombed them to avoid war

....is from 2014 (!!)
The more things change, the more they stay the same

Or any region for that matter. There are only people. People of varying shades of good and bad that vary situationally and over time. Hell, even where stuff falls on the good / bad spectrum depends on who you ask.

I'm going to share this!

Political Spaghetti when I was doing a similar chart to explain a non profit with whom I worked and the who liked who and who would work with who.

Resistance is futile.

to get a map, erase all current borders and state names, then start studying the history of various areas with regard to empires, traditional tribes, sectarian settlements and zones, and movements of populations with time.

One might reach a moderate level of understanding in one human lifetime of study.......

Seriously, it does help the amateur like myself to realize that current borders (mostly imposed by imperialistic nations) don't hold the same value and meaning as ours do. Traditional tribal or past empire zones and historical settlement areas in many cases may be far more important to these people. Adding to this head-spinner is the mix of races and religions.

It's unfortunate our population has so little knowledge and understanding of this part of the world, considering the human and physical capital we've invested over many decades.

and dividing up countries' new borders based on a straight edge ruler is one of them That is not the way to do it.

It was VietNam in the 60s/70s. It's the ME in the 90's through present.

can lift us out of a depression and bring us prosperity. Korea showed us we didn't even have to win. Vietnam showed us it didn't even matter if we lost. The Middle East is showing us the war never has to end. We have an economy built around weapons and war. It's all about money.

To bad we never learned we could have that same prosperity, probably even more if we had put our efforts into education and health care. If we could have spent our money on those things instead of waging war we would all have masters degrees and live to be 125.

We need to prioritize actual societal improvement. Which means changing our politics, IMO. Stop going along with the MIC-led agenda which is retrogressing humanity.