Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.

Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.

Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.

The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.

That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.

The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.

The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.

If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.

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ctippett 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Except America went to war with Saddam Hussein a full decade before the move to the Euro and was largely a reaction to the invasion of Kuwait.

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coldtea 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).

Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.

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cogman10 3 hours ago | parent [-]

To add, the primary reason the US supported Iraq was because it didn't want Iran to send oil to the USSR.

This was because the US didn't want a communist nation to have a good economy.

That's the story of a bunch of the CIAs operations.

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kakacik an hour ago | parent [-]

Iran itself in its current form is a continuous line of failures of CIA and MI6 that led to their revolution against highly unpopular shah that was undemocratically installed only by those powers.

Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.

As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.

Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...

	▲	YZF 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's complicated. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution The American and the British supported the Shah and ousted the popular prime minister in 1953: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... But why start/stop there? We can go farther back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran Anyways, it's true the US meddled in Iran. The most recent meddling pre the Islamic Revolution pressuring the Shah to improve the human rights situation which enabled the (mostly secular) anti-regime forces to organize. "In 1977 the Shah responded to the "polite reminder" of the importance of political rights by the new American president, Jimmy Carter, by granting amnesty to some prisoners and allowing the Red Cross to visit prisons. Through 1977 liberal opposition formed organizations and issued open letters denouncing the government." from the above. These social process culminated in the Shah leaving Iran. Kind of funny: "Worse for the Shah was that the Western media, especially the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), immediately put Khomeini into the spotlight.[18][151] Khomeini rapidly became a household name in the West, portraying himself as an "Eastern mystic" who did not seek power, but instead sought to "free" his people from "oppression." Western media outlets, usually critical of such claims, became one of Khomeini's most powerful tools.[18][117]" There are a lot of good books about Iran. Another interesting aspect is that a lot of the idealistic left wing revolutionaries that tried to remove the Shah were IIRC amongst the first to be lined up against a wall and executed by the Islamists that took over. AI summary: "The aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution was a brutal and tragic period for the secular, left-wing, and Marxist groups that had played a crucial role in overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While the revolution is often remembered strictly as an Islamic uprising, it was actually a broad coalition of secular liberals, student movements, labor unions, communists (like the Tudeh Party), Marxist guerrillas (like the Fedayeen-e Khalq), and Islamists who united against the Shah's autocracy. However, once the Shah went into exile in January 1979 and the monarchy collapsed, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist supporters moved swiftly to monopolize power and systematically eliminate their former revolutionary partners." EDIT: Another interesting detail in there is that some internal massacre ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1978) ) is blamed on the Zionists. This claim is completely debunked - never happened. Everything old is new again.