3 ms·

Bad things exist on a spectrum from "kind of bad" to "unadulterated evil". I'd peg the US invasion of Iraq somewhere around "pretty damn malevolent", but also q

Bad things exist on a spectrum from "kind of bad" to "unadulterated evil". I'd peg the US invasion of Iraq somewhere around "pretty damn malevolent", but also quite far from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is a conceivable universe—not a likely one; the war was both malevolent and stupid—in which setting up a democracy in Iraq made life better for millions of people. Saddam Hussein was a brutal and ruthless dictator. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an elected president. It's true that my assessment is based on the view that democracies are inherently more just than autocracies, and not any sort of international law regarding sovereignty. I'm not defending the US's invasion of Iraq. However, I do think democracies are better than autocracies, and I think the world should react differently depending on which is at stake.

whatshisface 5y ago
The counterfactual left-alone Saddam would have to do a lot of destruction and killing to work his way up to matching an invasion and occupation.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  Saddam had already matched that scale of destruction in the Iraq-Iran war, which killed many times more people. That fact doesn't exonerate the USA (which supported Iraq at the time!) or justify the 2003 war, but the human cost of his reign wasn't small, and given his subsequent invasion of Kuwait there was very little reason to expect he was done with invading and occupying people.
- pfraze 5y ago
  The invasion was a bad, bad, no-good idea, but to add some color to what you're observing, one of the biggest conversations within the US at the turn of the century was whether we should enact foreign policy according to a moral mandate. It was a constant topic of punditry ("Should we be the world's police?") and off the top of my head I can say the movie Airforce One and the tv show Westwing both directly talked about it, and both suggested we should. Again: bear in mind that the invasion was a bad idea and some Americans at the time said so, but there was also some sense that non-involvement was selfish or immoral. There was much less understanding that the pain it would inflict could so far exceed the intended benefits. We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is.
  - causi 5y ago
    We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is. I'm not sure that we have. The single most important concept of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is the vast, yawning difference between going to war primarily to stop one organized government from attacking another and going to war to effect regime change on a country. The former is very easy to do with a powerful professional military and the latter is effectively impossible. I don't think the difference has sunk in for most Americans.
seiferteric 5y ago
The big difference is that there was a very effective disinformation campaign that led the world to believe that Saddam had WMDs and might use them. In the post 9/11 times, many countries believe this was sufficient to justify the war and a coalition was built. It took a good while to know for sure that there were no WMDs... oops. So ya the war was wrong and dumb and we should have had more and better info to justify it before invading but didn't seems so clear at the time. Plus Saddam was a dictator and had very few friends so nobody was too bothered.
- throw10920 5y ago
  > Saddam had WMDs and might use them Saddam is known to have had chemical weapons, the line between which and "true WMDs" is pretty thin, if it exists at all. I don't think that there's much of a "disinformation" campaign here if the New York Times (as well as a third-party international organization) repeatedly documented the existence of said weapons. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/questions-answers-abandoned-chemical-weapons-in-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/question... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousands-of-iraq-chemical-weapons-destroyed-in-open-air-watchdog-says-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousand... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middleeast/chemical-weapons-iraq-pentagon-secrets.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middlee... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...

whatshisface 5y ago

The counterfactual left-alone Saddam would have to do a lot of destruction and killing to work his way up to matching an invasion and occupation.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
Saddam had already matched that scale of destruction in the Iraq-Iran war, which killed many times more people. That fact doesn't exonerate the USA (which supported Iraq at the time!) or justify the 2003 war, but the human cost of his reign wasn't small, and given his subsequent invasion of Kuwait there was very little reason to expect he was done with invading and occupying people.
pfraze 5y ago
The invasion was a bad, bad, no-good idea, but to add some color to what you're observing, one of the biggest conversations within the US at the turn of the century was whether we should enact foreign policy according to a moral mandate. It was a constant topic of punditry ("Should we be the world's police?") and off the top of my head I can say the movie Airforce One and the tv show Westwing both directly talked about it, and both suggested we should. Again: bear in mind that the invasion was a bad idea and some Americans at the time said so, but there was also some sense that non-involvement was selfish or immoral. There was much less understanding that the pain it would inflict could so far exceed the intended benefits. We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is.
- causi 5y ago
  We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is. I'm not sure that we have. The single most important concept of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is the vast, yawning difference between going to war primarily to stop one organized government from attacking another and going to war to effect regime change on a country. The former is very easy to do with a powerful professional military and the latter is effectively impossible. I don't think the difference has sunk in for most Americans.

seiferteric 5y ago

The big difference is that there was a very effective disinformation campaign that led the world to believe that Saddam had WMDs and might use them. In the post 9/11 times, many countries believe this was sufficient to justify the war and a coalition was built. It took a good while to know for sure that there were no WMDs... oops. So ya the war was wrong and dumb and we should have had more and better info to justify it before invading but didn't seems so clear at the time. Plus Saddam was a dictator and had very few friends so nobody was too bothered.

throw10920 5y ago
> Saddam had WMDs and might use them Saddam is known to have had chemical weapons, the line between which and "true WMDs" is pretty thin, if it exists at all. I don't think that there's much of a "disinformation" campaign here if the New York Times (as well as a third-party international organization) repeatedly documented the existence of said weapons. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/questions-answers-abandoned-chemical-weapons-in-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/question... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousands-of-iraq-chemical-weapons-destroyed-in-open-air-watchdog-says-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousand... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middleeast/chemical-weapons-iraq-pentagon-secrets.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middlee... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...