That actually isn't what I said at all. I said I didn't know the particulars of every situation where we intervened in the region. I mean we're going back to the 50s and 60s here and I'm not going to claim I know why we did what we did back then.
But nice try anyway.
Yeah, but our reasons for messing around these days are no better than they were back then.
Fuck Israel. It was a nation formed because everyone felt guilty for the holocaust, but no one wanted to take in the Jewish refugees that had been displaced because of it. The U.S. didn't, the Europeans didn't, the Soviet Union didn't, and Germany was really in no position at the time to do so. So we decided to plop down a new nation in land that they really didn't have any rights to. Israel benefits way more from us than we do from them. It's been one-sided all throughout history. But the Zionists have a lot of pull and lobbying power in the U.S., and when you combine that with the Fundamentalists idea that Israel is needed to bring about the rapture, we will never have intelligent foreign policy as far as that's concerned.
It's no secret Hussein was pursuing WMD's. However, he didn't have them. His underlings were just as corrupt as he was and were skimming money. Besides, although an asshole, Hussein wasn't stupid. He would never have used them on any of the U.S. interests. He wanted to scare Iran. Just as India (our ally) wanted to scare Pakistan, and that's why they got them, in spite of acquiring them illegally. And France got them as well in violation of many international treaties, but we didn't invade them.
Oh, but it wasn't the WMD's it was Hussein's abuses of power that justify us going in. I find it amusing that the Neocons trot this out as a reason because it holds less water than the WMD argument. There are many tyrants that should be deposed under that logic. Why not take out Mugabe? Why not take out Kim? Why not invade Iran? (Oh, wait, there are people pushing for that already.)
Our reasons for being involved over there are just as bad as they always have been. And we procede to make the same mistakes over and over over. Even children are smart enough to know that when they touch the hot burner on the stove and develop a blister that touching it again would be a bad idea. Why can't politicians figure it out?