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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

You may know more about this than I do, but what happened in Iraq was that the first military governor held together the same people who were under Saddam in a semi-stable arrangement, but was replaced with someone else that had instructions from Washington to conduct "De-Ba'athification," for some reason. This lead quickly to the collapse of the state due to the persecution of everyone who had any authority, and the replacement of Iraqi systems with military administration at all levels down to the villages as far as it could be maintained, which created the ten year war.

I do not think it would be to the benefit of people who live in Iran, even if they were Christian, to live through the bombings and mass destruction of the proposed war in exchange for life under US territorial administration, which has not been very good historically.

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i don't get that. Saddam Hussain was a genocidal, fascist lunatic. The world is certainly a better place with him gone. Even if America didn't handle the subsequent occupation too well, i would argue (and you are free to disagree) that Iraq was still better off.

But an American occupation isn't even on the table. Nobody is interested in that. The most anyone wants at the moment is for the US to drop a MOAB on fordo and mop up the rest of Irans military from the air.

> Saddam Hussain was a genocidal, fascist lunatic.

Yes.

> The world is certainly a better place with him gone. Even if America didn't handle the subsequent occupation too well, i would argue (and you are free to disagree) that Iraq was still better off.

That is mad talk. Things have been much worse, so much worse for almost everyone in and around Iraq since that war.

ISIS for one thing, was a direct result of the perfidious actions of foreigners in Iraq.

So much chaos was created, there is no way the invasion of Iraq improved the world

It's like saying that russia is worse off after the collapse of communism and attributing that to capitalism.

It's true, because that system worked for a few generations of people. A sudden change, even for a theoretically better system, can't make things better for people. Now we can see how much worse things became. Russia is completely deranged state at the moment, much much worse than Iran.

Communism never worked. People just survived it for a few generations. Who can say what europe would look like today if the Soviet union hadn't collapsed in 1991?

Probably would have been much better under communism for the last 30 years, if you want to go by comparing China's last 30 years of growth and prosperity and comparing that to my state's last 30 years of stagnation and methlabsperity.

the way I see it is that a country is better (or richer) if US allows them to trade with rich countries, not directly built on political systems, but political systems can affect being inclusive or exclusive of the global market.

Yes it was. Living standards went down and oligarchs plundered the state.

opinion like this can only come from someone who have lived a life of privilege, thousands mils away from systematic violence or hunger someone in a war torn country constantly have to face.

For an average individual going about their day, lack of political freedom is a 100x better option than lack of food or security that Iraq (or Libya or Afghanistan) went through.

>For an average individual going about their day, lack of political freedom is a 100x better option than lack of food or security

I couldn't agree with you more. I can think of at least one excellent example of this.

But in the case of Iraq there is no question in my mind that deposing saddam was the right thing to do.

If anything the person i was replying to was lecturing op, apparently an actual Iranian, about why American involvement is bad for him.

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