I agree with your entire comment except the end.

I'm not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we've ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they're still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I'd probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I'd imagine.

In totality though I'm not really sure to what extent it's in the US's best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.

People seem to forget, people even seemed to forget in 2002 and 2003, that Bush had been talking about finishing what his father started all the way back when he was running for president the first time in 1999. I kept telling people at the time.

I haven't forgotten that George H.W. Bush (the President's father) was literally in a meeting with a member of the bin Laden family when the attacks occurred.

Got a source for that?

Best I can find/remember, it is a distortion of this passage from Dan Briody’s book The Iron Triangle, or at the very least it is an unproven claim.

A Chance Meeting

That same morning, in the plush setting of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, DC, the Carlyle Group was holding its annual international investor conference. Frank Carlucci, James Baker III, David Rubenstein, William Conway, and Dan D'Aniello were together, along with a host of former world leaders, former defense experts, wealthy Arabs from the Middle East, and major international investors as the terror played out on television. There with them, looking after the investments of his family was Shafiq bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's estranged half-brother. George Bush Sr. was also at the conference, but Carlyle's spokesperson says the former president left before the terror attacks, and was on an airplane over the Midwest when flights across the country were grounded on the morning of September 11. In any circumstance, a confluence of such politically complex and globally connected people would have been curious, even newsworthy. But in the context of the terrorist attacks being waged against the United States by a group of Saudi nationals led by Osama bin Laden, the group assembled at the Ritz-Carlton that day was a disconcerting and freakish coincidence.

Or.. one is bad and the other one is way worse.

The thing that always amuses me about this is that Iran was a burgeoning liberal democracy until the CIA and MI6 toppled it in 1953, installing a previously overthrown autocrat (overthrown by said forces of democracy), who ruled until 1979, when he was overthrown by religious hard liners, who really only had mass support because the autocrat was too authoritarian.

And the reason the U.S. and Britain overthrew their democracy? They nationalized their oil industry to give profits back to their people, which entailed taking over refineries and wells ‘owned’ by British Petroleum.
The U.S. created their own boogeyman in the area because they wanted to give a corporation near-free access to Iran’s oil. Which in turn lead to the oil crisis and instability in the region.
The U.S. has really got to stop trying to put out fires while covered in crude oil.

Which one is the way worse one? Because I can't really think of a way in which one is way worse than the other. I wouldn't ever want to live in either place if I were a woman or a queer person.

100% agree, no longer being oil dependent would make the middle east a saver place (as well as having many other advantages).

But even the green revolution needs cheap labor, recourses, and rare-earth metals. Countries that do not want to play game and want to nationalize key industries for instance, will be coerced financially or militarily by greater powers (be it the West, China, or Russia).

So the idea of one country being worse than the other is not really relevant and moreover a known strategy for getting war support. I am happy that I don’t live in Iran or Saudi Arabia, but escalating conflict with either of them will not improve anybody’s life. Look at Syria or Libya.

One could argue that the Florida Supreme Court is responsible for millions of Iraqi/Afghan deaths and untold damage to democracy and the climate by forcing that election the way people didn’t vote. W should have been a baseball manager, he was, as the Rs do, completely unqualified against an actual experienced person at the job but had the quips and genealogy.

Florida, republicans, consistently making everyone’s life worse. WHY DO PEOPLE STILL VOTE FOR THEM

Hesitant, forlorn and very much hopefully misplaced resigned upvote.

I want to dismiss your assertions out of hand as too pessimistic and cynical but…yeah, we let them win at least the battle if not the whole shebang.

My hope stems from kids today generally being kinder, open minded and not “tolerant” but actually coexisting with nary a thought. Better people will make a better world if we give them the chance to before fucking up beyond repair.

I'm definitely furrowing my eyebrows at you. You're not wrong, and I'm mad about that.

That was Bush’s motivation. Cheney recruited him to be President while Cheney was head of Halliburton.

Halliburton made a metric shit ton off all this shit.

Cheney was WAAAYYY more involved in policy - especially geopolitics - than previous VPs.

Once W realized that Cheney was a lying sack of shit, he was banished from policy, but that wasn’t until almost the end of the second term.