It seems the technique you’re describing is a kind of societal “good cop, bad cop”. Similar scenario to an interrogation too (trying to get information from someone who does not want to share the information) because in this case the challenge is “how to get people to share the capacity for self-determination, quality of living, and dignity when they clearly prefer to hoard it, even to the detriment of others”.

My youth was at least partly misspent hacking z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC664. Not as many regrets as one might assume. I miss when (8-bit) assembler was simple enough to hand-code without playing “surf the reference manual”.

…which is very much by design. The “Ownership Class” have understood the value of “Targeted Divide and Conquer” for a while now. A line from Metallica’s Master of Puppets comes to mind: Keep them tired it makes them well.

Although I entirely agree with the spirit of your point I’d like to add a long-winded side-note (essentially “and also”, not “but”). I guess when treated as a “title” Veganism is an inherently philosophical stance, but many conflate “Veganism” with “Having A Strictly Vegan Diet/Lifestyle” so my comment is for those people. Some who identify with the latter of the two (like myself) may be as such - or at least have become as such - for various other “logical reasons”. In the early-90s I inadvertantly became “mostly vegetarian, sometimes pescaterian” due to living with a vegetarian girlfriend. Working in an extremely physically strenuous career, and also coming from a childhood littered with various unexplainable health “issues”, I noticed (with hindsight) huge and surprising physiological benefits from that change. Due to that, and reading about how fundamental human classifying parameters are at the very herbivorous end of the spectrum (nails not claws, very long intestines, low-acidity digestive system which struggles to break down harder animal cell-walls in food, sweating through skin not tongue, mostly non-canine teeth, not having predatory close-set eyes, etc), I proceeded within a year to full vegetarianism - this time consciously. It took years to overcome the n00b mistakes (lack of nutritional knowledge, cooking skills, motivation) that usually eventually turn people back off vegetarianism, and at that point as some of the “fog of war” cleared I noticed a few lingering “issues” from my youth. I had researched food intolerances so did a test to find I was moderately intolerant to 3 types of meat and a few other odd things, and more importantly strongly intolerant to milk (and milk products). The followup consultant told me such a strong reaction indicates all animal-milk would be problematic, not just cow’s. That prompted going vegan in about 2013, with such a dramatic further health-improvement I had to tell myself not to obsess with “if only I’d known this 30 years ago”. Even though I have since become increasingly “philosophically vegan” through a kind of mental osmosis, the point I want to make here is that was really post-hoc, as a side-effect. My original drivers were “purely by accident, then conscious but for functional reasons”. These days - nearly 30 years after going vegetarian and more than 10 years after going vegan - I just do some resistance/weight-training each morning yet I’m far more healthy and “built” than I ever was throughout an effectively “acrobatic” career (even when training for that career 45hrs/week and eating half-kilo mincemeat-based meals as a teenager), even though I ended that career years ago. Those are also very “logical reasons” in addition to the usual “logical ethical vegan reasons regarding treatment of animals”, as also are the “logical ecological reasons” too (particularly the extreme amount of deforestation that is done to create grazing land for livestock).

(NOTE: I am not a doctor, nutritionist, etc - just someone who has learned a lot of lessons the hard way and likes to share). Without challenging the focus of these stats, I’d like to add two interrelated side-notes (from decades of being professionally physically active, and then decades of being professionally deskbound and too burnt out to move in my spare time, and then getting it mostly back under control later): (1) If you have reached the point where you have long-term struggled with losing weight then - unless you are a very rare exception - changing diet alone will likely not be enough because (2) the steepest but most important curve is “reprogramming your metabolism”. One of the most common psychological obstacles I see people hit after years of sedentary living is naively changing only what they eat and getting disappointed when their body doesn’t magically “change gears” by itself. The second most common obstacle I see (when people do also start moving their body too) is “counting kilos/pounds” and giving up in frustration when the numbers don’t go down straight away, or even go up. When you do “any old exercise” you burn energy while you exercise (which is of course better than not doing any, and helps with aerobic/cardio/psychological fitness too) but beyond that one of the best secrets to serious body transformation is to build muscle (including the women, and not necessarily to a “bodybuilding” degree - a lot of muscle building happens before the “looking jacked” phase). When you do that the increased muscle burns more energy all day and night, not just during the exercise - it reprograms your metabolism. Even better, the longer you do it it doesn’t just “change gears” in those moments/days, it teaches your body to become better at “changing gears” in the future. Eventually (unless you have a medical condition, etc) the excess fat burns itself off in service of your body’s new functional requirements. Another thing that surprises many is how little resistance training is actually needed for a good baseline to start with (for many people three “adequate but not crazy” workouts per week is enough to see steady progress). BUT a big confusion happens for people weighing themselves all the time - muscle is more dense than fat so there is a good chance if doing it the right (emotionally & financially sustainable) way your overall weight might appear to plateau for ages (or even increase) at first while the increase in dense muscle offsets the loss of sparse fat. I suggest for “tracking weight/fat loss” in most typical cases do so indirectly, not by naively counting loss of overall kilos (of fat, muscle, bones, organs, tendons, ligaments, and so on combined). Regarding diet (especially when exercising) some good rules of thumb are to ensure a broad spread of micro nutrients by shopping for various fruits, veges, nuts, seeds, etc (including semi-regularly surprising yourself with things you usually wouldn’t buy to cover the edge-case micros), ensure a good balance of macro nutrients (often the “40 30 30” guide is near enough - 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fats - but when strong muscle-building you will need higher amount of protein, covering broad amino acid spectrum), reduce processed foods which are “energy dense” (a euphemism for “nutrient sparse”), keep hydrated, get sun (or other source of vitamin D) every day, reduce sources of stress (stress-addiction to adrenaline and cortisol is real and devastating to your body, and highly addictive if you continue for too long). The most important part is - whatever positive changes you achieve - you need to win the mind-game by making them part of your unquestioning routine, not a novelty that you try to keep kicking down the road. The best equivalent I can think of for this is brushing your teeth - most people find it boring but “just do it” without pondering “will I manage to brush my teeth today”. Internalise the other changes the way you brush your teeth.

I’ll answer the “why would it now lead to disaster” part, and by shuffling names, places, & contexts around I believe much of that can be obliquely backported to the same question with respect to runup to the world wars of yore.

USA’s multi-decade cultural imperialism and dogged pursuit of economic hegemony led to it imposing itself as a global barometer and gatekeeper (despite being famously incompetent at both). The upshot is that now, even though philosophically it would be wonderful for the US to finally stop enforcing a petrodollar-driven serfdom on so much of the world in the name of “infinite (US economic) expansion”, pragmatically speaking a magical and abrupt “pull out” would be wildly irresponsible, much like yanking an arrow out of a wound in the direction from which it entered (causing a Jackson Pollock’s worth of collateral damage). That would largely be because the sudden power vacuum would not be able to be filled in time by other countries (who are under-resourced due to aforementioned hegemonic squeezing), leaving not enough people to “not tolerate the intolerant”, leading to explosive expansion of the “ignorant bullies masquerading as politicians” brigade (not unlike Hitler’s opportunistic power-grab while the politicians who should have been the ballwark against him hubristically sat on their hands). See: https://www.ournationalconversation.org/post/explaining-the-paradox-of-tolerance

But… but he’s not a hurricane… I guess they could fix him up with horse tranquilliser and bleach afterwards though. (adding a /s here for the terminally oblivious)

I never used Reddit other than the rare view via a search-engine when trying to find something. I now lurk Lemmy daily but barely ever post. I read so many enlightening things here. Not leaving.

Are we really supposed to believe it was a threatening show of force to cow the entire world into throwing away profits and using our currency?

I don’t think it was as much about “making an example of them” as it was about getting them back to accepting USD (and “recycling” those back into the US economy) ASAP. Installed Iraq administrations switched straight back to USD since the invasion.

I sympathise with your “TL;DR” feeling (why oh why do academics - including the extremely knowledgable ones - so often make their otherwise-valid points soooo long-winded and self-referential? …which is why I love the project started by Alan Alda - https://www.aldacenter.org/ by the way). In the author’s partial defence though the initial “note to readers” text is follow-up to responses and updates, before the guts of the essay which follows (I think he could have more clearly formatted those parts differently in coloured boxes or such, so people could easily/quickly see where the “the original content” starts),

Firstly I say persevere with the essay if you can bear it (even if you need to skim initial verbiage) - there are a lot of profound insights, especially considering it was written 20 years ago as events were happening, and it ultimately answers your questions comprehensively. However for some quicker on-ramps about its primary tenet I was able to find from a quick DDG-search of “petrodollar currency war” that the rest of the reporting world is slowly catching-up (in many cases only now, 20 years later). Some top-links I found from that search (which I mainly just skimmed the beginnings of for context, so don’t necessarily endorse entirely) are:

• https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/the-us-is-facing-a-major-challenge-as-petrodollar-loses-force-1032063614
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling
• https://followthemoney.com/americas-petrodollar-system-a-timeline-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-us-dollar/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-petrodollars-rearranged-the-world/2021/08/11/3474aee2-ca09-11eb-81b1-34796c7393af_story.html

The Wikipedia link about Petrodollar-recycling seems to have a nicely concise summary to answer your question:

How does it help or hurt the US if Iraq makes its the Euro or Dollar?

…and my very quickly typed (therefore far from accurate but hopefully high-level enough) answer would be something like this:

Following 1971 when the US forced termination of the Bretton Woods system (abandoned “gold-backed currency” for “fiat currency backed by smoke and mirrors”), by 1974 they became dangerously vulnerable due to over-spending on war (and some other endeavours) but found a quick-fix through petrodollar recycling (“buy loads of oil and the oil-producing country in-turn invests their profits heavily back into the US”). That was initially setup with Saudi Arabia but ended up being with all of OPEC, and because oil became the yardstick for international trade eventually the situation became such that the currency the world trades oil in became the de-facto “world trade” currency, and therefore the “international reserve currency”. This creates a scenario in which “the US going under would take much of the world under with it” (generalising and summarising very crudely). That of course incentivised much of the world to protect the USD (and therefore protect the US from itself) in myriad ways and seemingly incentivised the consequent US administrations to hubristically spend wild/reckless amounts (especially on war) feeling like they are immune to “Consequences [tm]”. The mantra was always “If you switch your reserve funds away from USD you will tank your country”, but over time the expanding Euro-spending block of countries were becoming as big (eventually bigger) oil-buyers than the US, and Iraq switching their reserve to Euro turned out not only to be non-problematic but even “very successful”. The US knew this would cause a chain-reaction of countries wanting to try the same switch to Euros (or at least be less phobic of considering it) so they needed it stomped out, while also finding other soundbite-friendly “reasons” for the stomping - screaming “look over here, look over here” so the mass-media would not notice the “petrodollar hegemony preservation” reason. WMDs was their gambit and it largely “worked” due to most people only listening to hot-button soundbites and retrofitting manufactured narratives to justify exceptionalism-fueled superficial knee-jerk responses. I think vanishingly few people would disagree with the fact that Hussein was a terrible, unforgivably criminal dictator, but not enough people asked “why are they suddenly only doing something about him now?”.

Regarding Iraq: Because he cynically played enforcer for a lot of very rich (AKA influential) people who were scared that the US petrodollar hegemony was about to be supplanted by the Euro once people did the maths on Hussein’s recent successful pivot to Euro as reserve currency https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html - notice how the puppet government that was then installed made it one of their first tasks to switch the country’s reserve back to USD. The ongoing currency war was and is the actual war behind the “war” (wars).

Regarding Afghanistan: Everyone knew there was just too much “fog of war” to build a slam-dunk case against him for it. At best it would have ended up being framed by media as hand-waving about “wrong country” or “not just that country”. I remember scratching my head wildly though when he was spouting his “with us or against us” and “bomb them back to the stone age” rhetoric (and going unilateral - with the help of his Blair poodle - when the UN disagreed). He raced straight past “un-presidential” on his way to “extremely childish” when conflating “surgically remove some known terrorists from their hiding places” with “go all scorched earth on the entire country where they might have last been hiding”. There might have been some chance of making a case for recklessness (similar to the distinction between “manslaughter” & “murder”) - on the part of a jumped-up cowboy-wannabe playing “war president”, all hubristically drunk on the power he effectively inherited from his dad. As mentioned in many of the other comments though the US would never “allow” the ICC to bring such a conviction (undermining what the ICC is for), and any legal attempt within the US would just trigger screams of “you’re not a patriot” and “too soon” (still).