I’m totally against regime change—whether it comes with bombs, drones, NGOs, IMF leverage, NGO soft-power psyops, or the velvet glove of democracy promotion. I’m against it when it’s loud and violent. I’m against it when it’s sly and nudged. I’m against it when it’s marketed as salvation. Be it the softish regime change of Ukraine, or the hard attempts at regime change in Syria (won’t work), Libya (yikes), Afghanistan (nope), and Iraq (yikes!), it all feels like a single coherent doctrine masquerading as a series of noble mistakes.
You remember that general—Wesley Clark—who let slip there was a plan to take down seven countries in five years? Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran. That wasn’t a hypothetical. That wasn’t some late-night strategy note buried in a think tank PDF. It was a blueprint. Not for democracy, but for collapse. Not for peace, but for a kind of managed entropy. What else do you call it but a doctrine of rubbleization?
Let me take a stand. Not a shrug. Not a nuance. A belief.
Saddam Hussein was the hero of the Iraq War. Not the villain. His sons were awful, yes. His regime was brutal, yes. But Iraq was sovereign. It was whole. It had borders, schools, law, water, food, pride. And he kept it together. With force? Sure. But what else holds together a British-imposed jigsaw puzzle of tribes, sects, and colonial scars?
The West loved Saddam in the 1980s. He was a darling of the DOD and the CIA when it served our interests. Then we decided Iraq didn’t get to be independent anymore. We shattered it. We took a country and turned it into a sandbox of sectarian violence, contractor enrichment, and nation-building cosplay. And now we call it a lesson. No—call it what it is. A murder.
Same with Gaddafi. Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa. Free education. Clean water. Infrastructure. A vision for a pan-African currency. So we blew it up. And laughed when he was dragged through the dirt. The result? Open-air slave markets, chaos, warlords. And we still call that liberation.
Afghanistan? We armed the mujahideen in the ‘80s. Back then, they were the good guys. Then we invaded in 2001 and stayed for twenty years, only to leave under cover of night while the Taliban took back over without firing a shot. If we were the good guys, what was the result?
Yemen. Syria. Venezuela. Cuba. In each of these cases, I believe we—America—are the bad guy. We impose sanctions that starve, we fund revolutions that fizzle into corruption, we isolate and demonize and destabilize. We never care what comes next. We want obedience, not order. A broken state is easier to manage than a proud one.
And yes, I believe we provoked the war in Ukraine. I believe we pushed and nudged and coaxed until Russia, which had said clearly and for decades that Ukraine was a red line, finally reacted. I believe the 2014 Maidan revolution was a regime change op, and that everything since has been theater designed to mask that Ukraine is no longer sovereign in any meaningful way. It’s a proxy battlefield. It’s bait. And it worked.
But here’s where belief becomes memory. I lived in Berlin once. I was 37, in a German language class. And in that class was a 19-year-old Iranian girl from Tehran. She was luminous. Luxurious black hair, rich brown eyes, powerful, maternal, brilliant. She could have been my daughter, and yet we were friends. She told me stories about running around rooftops in bikinis, dodging the morality police, laughing through the cat-and-mouse of life under Islamic rule. She gave me her Yahoo email address. She made Iran real.
Up until then, Iran to me was flags burned, America cursed, death to Zionists and mad mullahs. But then this girl—whose name I forgot, and that still kills me—showed me the truth: Iran is human. Iran is filled with joy and mischief and beauty and spirit. And yes, pain. But so is every country.
The demonization is part of the war. It always starts by turning a place into an abstraction. First you make it evil. Then you make it rubble.
And yet the devil you know is often better than the devil you invent with drone strikes and regime change budgets. The Middle East doesn’t need more Western surgery. It needs to be left alone. These are not fragile peoples. They are resilient, patient, strong. Human beings are suffering engines. We endure. We adapt. And we remember.
Every time we try to “liberate” a country from itself, we make it worse. Because our liberation is not liberation at all. It’s a business. It’s a strategy. It’s empire with a nicer font.
I’m not hedging. I’m not equivocating. I’m not a yellow-line centrist or a dead aardvark in the middle of the road. I have beliefs. I believe we are often the villain. I believe we need to stop pretending our interventions are benign. And I believe memory—especially memory of joy, of beauty, of that girl in Berlin—is the antidote to propaganda.
This is the barf. This is the record. And I am keeping it.
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