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Comment by ShivShankaran | Hacker News Reader

> Biden administration continuing former President Donald Trump's opposition and refusing to return to the Obama administration’s 2016 abstention

One of the most interesting news I came across recently is that when Russia invaded Crimea, Biden had plans to arm Ukraine and requested them to fight Russians. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/30/what-will-ukraine-do-wi...

Obama personally intervened and refused to arm Ukraine or launch an offensive.

Shows how morally different Obama and Biden are even though they are politically close.

View on HN

Morally might read too much into the situation and calculus of global politics.

E.G. If Russia was to stop just there, what's the long term global risk vs if arming a nation opposed to a superpower resulting in WW-III? Where the calculus has changed today is that Ukraine was on the bright timeline path to being a de-fanged buffer state just like Russia supposedly wanted to maintain. Which was then invaded in an aggressive action to remove any such state in an action that would obviously push Russia's borders right against NATO, just as they'd always declared they didn't want right next to their country. They over-stepped, and this opened the moral high-ground for supplying weapons as well as their military blunders a practical and tactical position of two countries battling (risky but not a wildfire yet).

The Obama administration mistook nonoffensiveness for international leadership, and when surveys showed people being "generally feeling more positive towards the US", they interpreted that as a win and assumed it would translate into soft power.

It didn't though. None of that "general friendliness" ended up being a lever the US could use against China, Huawei, or Putin.

Biden I think is being more realistic here — the US builds soft power by being a reliable ally (when we commit) against a world full of active hostile powers. Not via nice words.

> the US builds soft power by being a reliable ally (when we commit) against a world full of active hostile powers.

Still waiting for the US to provide evidence of WMD in Iraq. /s

Sorry, I can’t stand hypocrisy.

See, I don't think this actually matters.

The problem is that the invasion of Iraq was an incompetent bloody shitshow. We had no reconstruction plan, we didn't make good local allies, we disassembled the state.

If we had quickly spun up a competent new plausibly democratic government without an insurgency, nobody would care whether or not we had found WMDs. 'Saddam was a dick, and now he's gone' would have been perfectly adequate, and our allies would have gladly come along for the next invasion in Myanmar or Iran or whoever the bad guy of the month was.

(but obviously, that's not the way history went)

> If we had quickly spun up a competent new plausibly democratic government without an insurgency

Well, yes, if we had done something magical and impossible, that would have distracted attention.

But even if the war hadn’t been a war of aggression based on lies led by people devoted to corrupt interests which shaped not only the decision to go to war but also the conduct of the occupation, that was never going to happen.

But if it wasn’t for those corrupt influences, which definitely contributed to how bad things actually went, we wouldn’t have gone to war in the first place. The problems with the outcomes were not unrelated to the bad motivations for war, they were tied to a common source.

I'm making the narrower argument that the WMDs don't matter, which I'm standing by.

- If the war had gone well, nobody would care about the false claims.

- If we hadn't claimed there were WMDs, and the war had gone badly, there would be other reasons to dislike the war.

- If we had found chemical weapons, and the war had still gone badly, nobody would newly think the war was justified (everyone knew that Iraq at one point had chemical weapons, obviously).

> Saddam was a dick, and now he's gone

Yes, but you also need to not support other dicks. Like, why are saudis bombing weddings in Yemen? And for how many years now? They still have Patriots “guarding” their airspace(yes, Iranian drones are dope). My point is, be consistent. If you’re a “world police” then don’t let anyone invade anyone else for any reason.

They were used in Syria. Look at YouTube.

You forgot the /s tag.

You're discrediting the multiple repeated chemical attacks by the Assad government on it's own people? The ones corroborated by the same UN in the title, and only denied by Assad and "we are not invading Ukraine" Russia?

Nope. It looks like you are waiting for a new Hollywood film about war in Iraq instead of reading and watching evidence. You cannot even open the Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMD_conjecture_in_the_aftermat...

> ISG formed a special working group to investigate and consider these claims. Charles Duelfer, head of inspectorate at time of publication, summarized the group's conclusion: "Based on the evidence available at present, ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However, ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials."

Right, very solid.

and also in Syria and in Libya (when Gaddafi threatened to leave the USD) and in Ukraine (when they refused to sign the gas for EU) and in Vietnam and Cambodia and in Latin America and in Somalia and in Iran.

just a powerful peaceful ally threatening the world with world peace.

Without Hyperbole Obama is one of the smartest and best presidents to come to US for a long time. While Biden is the most disgusting demented president coming in a notch above Trump.

The only area imo where Obama outperformed was in resisting his administration's warhawks, like Clinton. That stance was also completely abandoned after the Dems left Obama behind, like I'm afraid Biden's antitrust moves will be abandoned once he's safely in the past.

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