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Comment by mychael | Hacker News Reader

Democrats and Republicans alike pushed for it based on the intelligence available at the time [0]. To call him partially responsible for 100,000s of deaths is very unfair and not very classy considering he's dying soon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War

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I hear this argument a lot, and I just can't agree with it. The biggest miss was about chemical weapons, which even if true, would have been an entirely inadequate justification for the war that followed. The nuclear argument was never well supported and clearly looks fabricated in hindsight. To talk about bad intelligence is to accept that invading a country to preemptively to remove a dictator is a moral action, which is repeatedly demonstrated to be the exact opposite when viewed as a whole.

The results of the Iraq war were foreseeable by those that pushed for it. I can't accept that we should just politely not mention it because someone is dying of cancer. This is a war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. It's a big deal.

> invading a country to preemptively to remove a dictator is a moral action

That is widely believed. For example, that's exactly what Obama and Hillary did in Libya.

And the current disastrous result is just as predictable and evil as Iraq. Maybe more-so because we have such a recent example of why it is such a bad idea.

Quite true. And yet there was immense pressure to do it, often from people who were vocal opponents of the Iraq war (notably the French government).

Europe spearheaded the Libyan intervention. The U.S. came along for the ride, not because of some strongly held policy objective. The roles are usually reversed, but by 2011 Obama was already deeply skeptical of intervention. European powers have always had a keen interest in Libya, particularly Italy and France, and the U.K. was still pissed about Lockerbie. The U.S. wouldn't have gotten involved otherwise, no matter how much Hillary pressed.

That doesn't excuse the U.S., but we shouldn't equivocate culpability.

Sure, Bernard-Henri Levy deserves his share of the blame too. But how do BHL and 40K get on the same page about something like this? Do they stalk/roll around the same intellectual salons? No they don't. They do both, however, sing for their suppers. The masters had better like the song. The song sounded pretty good when DPRK pointed out what HRC's bayonet really meant. [0] The music buffs might be a bit nervous now, but few would be surprised if Trump gets a new high-pressure sales pitch that totally changes his mind before anything gets signed.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/1...

Yes, I agree, it's not right that you can screw up the world and get away with it because of ignorance. It's not a good excuse. If you have power and influence, ignorance is a crime.

I hope that humanity will one day become immune to this kind of individual-tragedy rhetoric and save their hearts for the stats.

> To call him partially responsible for 100,000s of deaths is very unfair and not very classy considering he's dying soon.

He definitely pushed that war and thus has some responsibility for the consequences. I do not wish him ill will and it is unfortunate that he is dying of cancer, it is a loss for his friends and family. That said, just because he is dying does not make him a saint nor do I have to pretend he is one, he clearly wasn't.

Very well put. It's important that we recognize the history that led us to where we are, even if it's not a super beautiful history.

I remember this particular period relatively clearly. There was intense debate everywhere, it was the most polarizing issue for a very, very long time. I was on the dove-side of the debate. I remember having some extremely heated debates with "hawks" (all online - these hawks somehow just disappeared after the invasion when it it got more and more obvious that there actually were no WMDs...).

When it comes to the War in Iraq, there are not many saints in Washington. Less we forget, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama executed the War in Iraq for many years and issued countless drone strikes. Does that means we should all be saying "Obama is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people!" ?

That Nobel Peace Prize for Obama was just so wrong. It was a Norwegian (Not Swedish) small celebrity/exposure hungry group of elderly people who abused the power of the brand for their personal gain.

(Liberal-minded americans downvoting this: please think twice. Not everything that seems to go against your instincts is downvote-worthy if you don't know the details. In this case the details matter.)

It would be super neat if anyone of the people who downvoted that could comment on... you know, why?

Please don't be so 1-dimensional.

> Democrats and Republicans alike pushed for it based on the intelligence available at the time

No, they didn't; there was a bipartisan (but more Republican than Democratic) group that supported a hard line with war as the ultimate resort based on the unclear intelligence being put forward by the Administration, but the Administration (and, even before it existed as such, the element of the neoconservative movement from which it's foreign policy and defense leadership was largely drawn) was actively pushing for war for much longer, and deliberately engineered the intelligence (which was not merely spun, but actually falsified) presented to others, including in Congress, to build support for the war.

> To call him partially responsible for 100,000s of deaths is very unfair

It's entirely accurate, just as it is for the bipartisan group that supported the war in Congress, even though the administration did lie to them to build that support, since the information about the pre-existing intent of the Administration was readily and publicly available, and the debunkings of enough of the intelligence to make clear the administration’s absence of good faith was likewise available.

All Americans are partially responsible for the costs of the Iraq war. That is irregardless of their support of it. This is how a democracy works, or to a bit lesser degree a psuedo-democracy republic as is the case here.

A citizen's level of responsibility increases for those who advocate for such actions, and the level increases with a wide and strong advocacy.

To attempt to wipe the slate clean of such responsibility is grossly unfair for everyone involved and must involve some deeper issues of which I will not speculate. The fact there was an appeal to eminent death as a reason to not call this out is absurd. A terminal condition doesn't retroactively absolve responsibility.

This is coming from someone who thinks the Iraq war was needed however it was done so in the height of incompetency.

You still think "the Iraq war was needed"? That really destroys your credibility in making this "spread the responsibility" argument. I'll accept some responsibility for the fact that I was duped and completely wrong about Iraq, but there were people against the whole venture at the time. It ain't their "responsibility".

Yes, I still think genocidal mass murders shouldn't be in power.

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