I mean the answer is pretty clear even for Europe. With ISIS committing acts of terror in Europe, it helps to have a country in the Middle East as an ally.
It's largely due to that alliance that ISIS even cares about Europe. The "alliance" itself is largely one-way - the US and Europe topple the government of any country that looks at Israel funny, and in return they get.. what?
The usual answer is oil, but the cost of the Iraq war is estimated at $1.9 trillion [1]. Even if all of Iraq's oil industry was taken by the US, and its revenue was 100% profit that went entirely to the US, at the current record-high export of $11 billion/month [2], it would take 15 years to break even.
But neither of those assumptions hold - oil industry profit margins vary between 5% and 30% [3,4], and the media seems shockingly disinterested in reporting how oil company ownership or profit flow changed following the war, but let's be generous and say it resulted in half of their total profits being diverted to the US (that weren't already diverted before).
Under these more realistic but still very generous assumptions (using the 30% high-water mark for profit margin), it would take 97 years to break-even. That is also assuming Iraq would remain a stable pawn to US interests for that entire time, and it wouldn't take more military spending to keep them in line.
Except that the cost was paid by Iraqi citizens, and, to a small degree, American taxpayers, while the profits go to a small group of people/companies. In other words it’s still extremely profitable to US - to the part of the country that makes decisions.
look at this. India, back before 1991, had this printed on their passport. I dare any human rights advocating country to do this today against Israeli apartheid state?
so europe, with all its tall talks of freedoms and human rights is openly supporting an apartheid state just because it wants an "ally" in a region that they cannot police themselves so they want constant infighting there rather than back home..... nice
Well…yeah. Realpolitik is about the reality on the ground not ideals and a perfect world that doesn’t exist.
Countries that lives in a fantasy world where you can cut off contact with every country that doesn’t meet your standards find themselves isolated pretty quickly.
