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I wonder how old the rest of the commentators are. I watched the Shock and Awe campaign. I watched Saddam fall. I remember thinking this is great. Years later,

I wonder how old the rest of the commentators are. I watched the Shock and Awe campaign. I watched Saddam fall. I remember thinking this is great. Years later, I understand it was a complete folly. Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good.

heavyset_go 8mo ago
This will be the start of something that never ends
TulliusCicero 8mo ago
Yes, whether these strikes are a good idea in general depends on whether they make life better for the regular people of Iran imo. That said, fuck Khamenei.
paxys 8mo ago
Every new generation in America learns this same lesson the hard way. You and your children will be paying the bill for this war for the rest of your life. Oil and defense companies will get richer. Nothing will change in the middle east.
- judahmeek 8mo ago
  That's oversimplifying. Iranian regime-allied forces were a big part of why Iraq was such a quagmire. The balance of power in the Middle East is shifting from the Sunni~Shia schism that it once was. Most of the remaining powers are willing to actually engage in diplomacy with Israel & prefer secular groups to Islamist groups. There's still personality conflicts, such as the one growing between the heads of Saudi Arabia & the UAE, but the general trend seems to be very promising.
  - Paianni 8mo ago
    Nah, if anything the Islamist groups are biding their time, waiting for the internationally-supported governments to lose the will to carry on before striking.
    - judahmeek 8mo ago
      No, I mean that even the Saudi's & the UAE are funding secular groups that are fighting Islamist groups because Saudi & UAE both believe that Islamist groups are too dangerous: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-growing-rift-between-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-growing-rift-betw...
      - Paianni 8mo ago
        The governments, yes, but not the general population necessarily. And the governments can't survive without oil revenue and/or external support, so they'll be losing in the long run.
  - sosomoxie 8mo ago
    Iraq was a quagmire because the US attacked them for no reason at all other than to further Israel's interests. We have no business in the Middle East. Period.
    - _DeadFred_ 8mo ago
      We went into Iraq because we had to station troops in Saudi Arabia in order to defend them against Iraq, and having US troops in 'the holy land' led to Osama Bin Laden leading to 9-11. People say the two aren't connected but if you learn the context at the time they were, just not in the basic way people want to understand situations.
      - sosomoxie 8mo ago
        That would help make my argument that we don't belong in the Middle East. I think people should learn more about Paul Wolfowitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
  - tomjakubowski 8mo ago
    A part, but not the only part. Factions like AQI and later ISIL/ISIS/IS were ideological enemies to both the US and Iran and its Shia militas. The invasion, regime change, and occupation in Iraq would have caused a mess even with a US-aligned regime in Iran.
csmpltn 8mo ago
You seriously don’t think Iraq is in a better place today than it has ever been? You miss Saddam?
- dfadsadsf 8mo ago
  Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.
  - csmpltn 8mo ago
    Plenty of people died under Saddam, too. Do you think the average Iraqi would choose to go back and live under Saddam?
    - greazy 8mo ago
      During the years which followed after the invasion, lots did, yes. This is first hand account btw. Now? I'm not sure as the country has mostly stablised.
    - bjourne 8mo ago
      Estimates put the number of people killed due to the American invasion between half a million and a million. Saddam's brutality paled in comparison to the carnage the US invasion caused.
      - wqaatwt 8mo ago
        This also includes indirect deaths? But if you add up the Iraq-Iran war and all his domestic atrocities it’s not that far (and these are only direct casualties).
  - GeoAtreides 8mo ago
    lol lmao is the civilian population being gassed in Iraq now? how about a brutal repressive regime backed by a secret police that tortured and disappeared thousands? is Iraq really the same as it was under Saddam?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
wfdsf2 8mo ago
One thing I notice on here is very few people understand counter intuitive stuff. As you said.. plenty of evidence where on the surface it seems good. But in reality it turns out to make the people in the region worse off.
- deaux 8mo ago
  That, combined with extreme short-termism and unbridled optimism. All three probably having a similar root cause. And we see this across the board. A canonical one that remains prevalent: "If only people would've come out and voted for Kamala in 2024, we wouldn't be in this mess". But then if you follow the pattern, with the candidate she was and what she would've done, this would've secured an ultra-MAGA victory in 2028 (and likely already by 2026 midterms). One more extreme, more devious, more intelligent from the get-go than the current one. People like to cling to "but you don't know that for sure", which is true, but we do know that with about 90% certainty. Betting on 10% is an awful idea and is indeed what has gotten you to where you're at. It's the single biggest reason for the huge power shift from the US to China. Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. Pain today for gain over time. Of course there are counterexamples, but by and large this holds. In this case, sure, many Iranians will be happy for a day - especially overseas. So that's what people focus on. People have entirely lost the ability to think realistically in years. Of course part of this is biological, we're monkeys. But there are many reasons to believe that this ability has greatly declined over the last 50 years, particularly in the West and especially in the US.
  - prewett 8mo ago
    > Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. I'm not sure that's the case with Xi. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he tries, but as far as I can tell from a distance, his value system produces unwise decisions long-term. 10+ years of Xi have slowed economic growth, produced antagonism diplomatically, I'm not sure that the Belt and Road is currently seen favorably. He hasn't figured out a way for local governments to be solvent without selling property, nor has he resolved the shadow debt. I think his policy of shutting down Shanghai and other zero-Covid polices destroyed the people's confidence in the CCP as steward of economic growth, as it became obvious that the government can just arbitrarily kill your business and imprison you in your own home or Covid center. I think that removing your top military leaders--who are the only ones with any actual combat experience--is helpful for a successful occupation of Taiwan. Certainly what Xi did with Hong Kong made peaceful re-unification with Taiwan very unlikely.
avaika 8mo ago
> Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good. I believe this is the legacy of leaders like Saddam. They build a very messy future for their countries. Whenever such a leader is gone, somebody has to take over power. Dictators tend to concentrate as much power in their hands as possible. Forced removal of such a leader might accelerate and / or destabilize power transition. Which might end up in a very messy scenario. Absolute power transition worked well with monarchy in the past, cause everybody knew who would be the next guy, there were rules and procedures. With dictatorship often times there are no rules. So power transition might turn into a complete chaos even with a natural death of a dictator.
Bender 8mo ago
Taking out Saddam allowed the Taliban to get right back to the raping of the Opium farmers wives and children. Not saying I approved of Saddam but I did enjoy the way he had originally curtailed the risk to his Opium revenue.
Rapzid 8mo ago
I turned 18 about 6 months after 9-11. Going to take a night off from worrying about forever wars and celebrate the end of the Ayatollah and Ali Khamenei.
erxam 8mo ago
[flagged]
baxtr 8mo ago
I am old enough. Iraq is not perfect today but so much better than it was. Go talk to Iraqis and see for yourself. It costs us some time, money and lives to get to this point. But Saddam (a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors) staying in power would have been way worse for the wider region.
- AlecSchueler 8mo ago
  I think the point being made is that there's wider fallout than just what's directly affected. If you go to Syria and ask Syrians how they feel about the affects on the wider region they might not so readily agree. Or even ask Iraqis in the border region who lived through ISIS rule.
  - baxtr 8mo ago
    I got the point. I’m challenging the causal chain. I don’t think anyone would agree that the crusades in the Middle Ages caused the current state of the Middle East. There is no way you can prove one or the other side. We can’t do controlled experiments with other worlds. So it’s all guesswork. That’s why I’m challenging. I think that things are much less causally connected as people want to believe.
    - bonsai_spool 8mo ago
      > I don’t think anyone would agree that the crusades in the Middle Ages caused the current state of the Middle East. I think the Crusades have not yet ended… And it is not clear that fewer people died following the US interventions than would have had Iraq been left to its own.
      - padjo 8mo ago
        Hegseth certainly doesn't given his book title
    - 627467 8mo ago
      Why go back 100s of years for explanations when 2003 is just over 20 years ago?
softwaredoug 8mo ago
In this case I bet they rotate Khamenis until they find someone who will capitulate like in Venezuela. Thats the hope at least. Seems like a completely different situation though. It could just as easily end up an unstable mess like Libya
jmyeet 8mo ago
We created Saddam Hussein. He was our foil against Iran. We propped up a war that killed over a million Iraqis and Iranians in the 1980s for no net strategic result. And why did we want to punish Iran? Because the fundamentalist regime overthrew our puppet (the Shah). And how did the Shah come to be a dictator, essentially? Because we overthrew the liberal democracy Iran had in 1953 at the behest of the british because Iran had wanted to control their own oil and BP wasn't happy. Even the fundamentalist regime in Iran is kind of America's fault. Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq in 1978 (IIRC) because when it became clear that Iran was lost, we wanted the fundamentalists to take over instead of the communists because we didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. It's also a pretty similar story with Osama bin Laden. As payback for Soviet support for North Vietnam, we supplied arms to the rebels in Afghanistan after the USSR invaded. Supplying Stinger SAMs to the mujahadeen was particularly devastating and these included Osama bin Laden. Isn't it weird that all this foreign interference always go badly and all these former puppets somehow end up becoming huge problems for us later? When will we learn, exactly? It's also worth noting that there was a strong desire in American policy circles to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11. 9/11 and the fake WMD story just became the excuse. For example, in 1998 a bunch of people sent a letter to then President Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq and topple Saddam [1]. Just look at the signatories on that letter and what part they played in the War on Terror. [1]: https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/98-Rumsfeld-Iraq.pdf https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/98-Rumsfeld-Iraq....
PolygonSheep 8mo ago
It's because we do these things not for American interests, but for the interests of a small country that has captured our political establishment through campaign finance and blackmail.
sieabahlpark 8mo ago
[dead]

heavyset_go 8mo ago

This will be the start of something that never ends

TulliusCicero 8mo ago

Yes, whether these strikes are a good idea in general depends on whether they make life better for the regular people of Iran imo. That said, fuck Khamenei.

paxys 8mo ago

Every new generation in America learns this same lesson the hard way. You and your children will be paying the bill for this war for the rest of your life. Oil and defense companies will get richer. Nothing will change in the middle east.

judahmeek 8mo ago
That's oversimplifying. Iranian regime-allied forces were a big part of why Iraq was such a quagmire. The balance of power in the Middle East is shifting from the Sunni~Shia schism that it once was. Most of the remaining powers are willing to actually engage in diplomacy with Israel & prefer secular groups to Islamist groups. There's still personality conflicts, such as the one growing between the heads of Saudi Arabia & the UAE, but the general trend seems to be very promising.
- Paianni 8mo ago
  Nah, if anything the Islamist groups are biding their time, waiting for the internationally-supported governments to lose the will to carry on before striking.
  - judahmeek 8mo ago
    No, I mean that even the Saudi's & the UAE are funding secular groups that are fighting Islamist groups because Saudi & UAE both believe that Islamist groups are too dangerous: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-growing-rift-between-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-growing-rift-betw...
    - Paianni 8mo ago
      The governments, yes, but not the general population necessarily. And the governments can't survive without oil revenue and/or external support, so they'll be losing in the long run.
- sosomoxie 8mo ago
  Iraq was a quagmire because the US attacked them for no reason at all other than to further Israel's interests. We have no business in the Middle East. Period.
  - _DeadFred_ 8mo ago
    We went into Iraq because we had to station troops in Saudi Arabia in order to defend them against Iraq, and having US troops in 'the holy land' led to Osama Bin Laden leading to 9-11. People say the two aren't connected but if you learn the context at the time they were, just not in the basic way people want to understand situations.
    - sosomoxie 8mo ago
      That would help make my argument that we don't belong in the Middle East. I think people should learn more about Paul Wolfowitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
- tomjakubowski 8mo ago
  A part, but not the only part. Factions like AQI and later ISIL/ISIS/IS were ideological enemies to both the US and Iran and its Shia militas. The invasion, regime change, and occupation in Iraq would have caused a mess even with a US-aligned regime in Iran.

csmpltn 8mo ago

You seriously don’t think Iraq is in a better place today than it has ever been? You miss Saddam?

dfadsadsf 8mo ago
Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.
- csmpltn 8mo ago
  Plenty of people died under Saddam, too. Do you think the average Iraqi would choose to go back and live under Saddam?
  - greazy 8mo ago
    During the years which followed after the invasion, lots did, yes. This is first hand account btw. Now? I'm not sure as the country has mostly stablised.
  - bjourne 8mo ago
    Estimates put the number of people killed due to the American invasion between half a million and a million. Saddam's brutality paled in comparison to the carnage the US invasion caused.
    - wqaatwt 8mo ago
      This also includes indirect deaths? But if you add up the Iraq-Iran war and all his domestic atrocities it’s not that far (and these are only direct casualties).
- GeoAtreides 8mo ago
  lol lmao is the civilian population being gassed in Iraq now? how about a brutal repressive regime backed by a secret police that tortured and disappeared thousands? is Iraq really the same as it was under Saddam?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

wfdsf2 8mo ago

One thing I notice on here is very few people understand counter intuitive stuff. As you said.. plenty of evidence where on the surface it seems good. But in reality it turns out to make the people in the region worse off.

deaux 8mo ago
That, combined with extreme short-termism and unbridled optimism. All three probably having a similar root cause. And we see this across the board. A canonical one that remains prevalent: "If only people would've come out and voted for Kamala in 2024, we wouldn't be in this mess". But then if you follow the pattern, with the candidate she was and what she would've done, this would've secured an ultra-MAGA victory in 2028 (and likely already by 2026 midterms). One more extreme, more devious, more intelligent from the get-go than the current one. People like to cling to "but you don't know that for sure", which is true, but we do know that with about 90% certainty. Betting on 10% is an awful idea and is indeed what has gotten you to where you're at. It's the single biggest reason for the huge power shift from the US to China. Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. Pain today for gain over time. Of course there are counterexamples, but by and large this holds. In this case, sure, many Iranians will be happy for a day - especially overseas. So that's what people focus on. People have entirely lost the ability to think realistically in years. Of course part of this is biological, we're monkeys. But there are many reasons to believe that this ability has greatly declined over the last 50 years, particularly in the West and especially in the US.
- prewett 8mo ago
  > Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. I'm not sure that's the case with Xi. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he tries, but as far as I can tell from a distance, his value system produces unwise decisions long-term. 10+ years of Xi have slowed economic growth, produced antagonism diplomatically, I'm not sure that the Belt and Road is currently seen favorably. He hasn't figured out a way for local governments to be solvent without selling property, nor has he resolved the shadow debt. I think his policy of shutting down Shanghai and other zero-Covid polices destroyed the people's confidence in the CCP as steward of economic growth, as it became obvious that the government can just arbitrarily kill your business and imprison you in your own home or Covid center. I think that removing your top military leaders--who are the only ones with any actual combat experience--is helpful for a successful occupation of Taiwan. Certainly what Xi did with Hong Kong made peaceful re-unification with Taiwan very unlikely.

avaika 8mo ago

> Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good. I believe this is the legacy of leaders like Saddam. They build a very messy future for their countries. Whenever such a leader is gone, somebody has to take over power. Dictators tend to concentrate as much power in their hands as possible. Forced removal of such a leader might accelerate and / or destabilize power transition. Which might end up in a very messy scenario. Absolute power transition worked well with monarchy in the past, cause everybody knew who would be the next guy, there were rules and procedures. With dictatorship often times there are no rules. So power transition might turn into a complete chaos even with a natural death of a dictator.

Bender 8mo ago

Taking out Saddam allowed the Taliban to get right back to the raping of the Opium farmers wives and children. Not saying I approved of Saddam but I did enjoy the way he had originally curtailed the risk to his Opium revenue.

Rapzid 8mo ago

I turned 18 about 6 months after 9-11. Going to take a night off from worrying about forever wars and celebrate the end of the Ayatollah and Ali Khamenei.

erxam 8mo ago

[flagged]

baxtr 8mo ago

I am old enough. Iraq is not perfect today but so much better than it was. Go talk to Iraqis and see for yourself. It costs us some time, money and lives to get to this point. But Saddam (a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors) staying in power would have been way worse for the wider region.

AlecSchueler 8mo ago
I think the point being made is that there's wider fallout than just what's directly affected. If you go to Syria and ask Syrians how they feel about the affects on the wider region they might not so readily agree. Or even ask Iraqis in the border region who lived through ISIS rule.
- baxtr 8mo ago
  I got the point. I’m challenging the causal chain. I don’t think anyone would agree that the crusades in the Middle Ages caused the current state of the Middle East. There is no way you can prove one or the other side. We can’t do controlled experiments with other worlds. So it’s all guesswork. That’s why I’m challenging. I think that things are much less causally connected as people want to believe.
  - bonsai_spool 8mo ago
    > I don’t think anyone would agree that the crusades in the Middle Ages caused the current state of the Middle East. I think the Crusades have not yet ended… And it is not clear that fewer people died following the US interventions than would have had Iraq been left to its own.
    - padjo 8mo ago
      Hegseth certainly doesn't given his book title
  - 627467 8mo ago
    Why go back 100s of years for explanations when 2003 is just over 20 years ago?

softwaredoug 8mo ago

In this case I bet they rotate Khamenis until they find someone who will capitulate like in Venezuela. Thats the hope at least. Seems like a completely different situation though. It could just as easily end up an unstable mess like Libya

jmyeet 8mo ago

We created Saddam Hussein. He was our foil against Iran. We propped up a war that killed over a million Iraqis and Iranians in the 1980s for no net strategic result. And why did we want to punish Iran? Because the fundamentalist regime overthrew our puppet (the Shah). And how did the Shah come to be a dictator, essentially? Because we overthrew the liberal democracy Iran had in 1953 at the behest of the british because Iran had wanted to control their own oil and BP wasn't happy. Even the fundamentalist regime in Iran is kind of America's fault. Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq in 1978 (IIRC) because when it became clear that Iran was lost, we wanted the fundamentalists to take over instead of the communists because we didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. It's also a pretty similar story with Osama bin Laden. As payback for Soviet support for North Vietnam, we supplied arms to the rebels in Afghanistan after the USSR invaded. Supplying Stinger SAMs to the mujahadeen was particularly devastating and these included Osama bin Laden. Isn't it weird that all this foreign interference always go badly and all these former puppets somehow end up becoming huge problems for us later? When will we learn, exactly? It's also worth noting that there was a strong desire in American policy circles to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11. 9/11 and the fake WMD story just became the excuse. For example, in 1998 a bunch of people sent a letter to then President Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq and topple Saddam [1]. Just look at the signatories on that letter and what part they played in the War on Terror. [1]: https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/98-Rumsfeld-Iraq.pdf https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/98-Rumsfeld-Iraq....

PolygonSheep 8mo ago

It's because we do these things not for American interests, but for the interests of a small country that has captured our political establishment through campaign finance and blackmail.

sieabahlpark 8mo ago

[dead]