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Comment by 1a527dd5 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Hegseth certainly doesn't given his book title

Why go back 100s of years for explanations when 2003 is just over 20 years ago?

You see that’s exactly my point.

If you can go back 20 years, you can do that 5 times and end up at 100.

So what about libya, syria, yemen, afghanistan, even venezuela

plus you can't know how Iraq would be today without the invasions

Iraq was ruled by a sociopath that used chemical weapons against his own citizens. I didn’t agree with the invasion, but there is no doubt Iraq is better off today than it would have been without U.S. involvement.

That's an absurd statement. No doubt? Saddam would be pushing 90 now, odds are he would be dead anyway and who knows how that chain of events would have gone.

Iraq is a fantastic lesson to heed today.

In the first gulf war, Bush Sr. refused to occupy the country. He viewed it as too difficult and too expensive. In the second gulf war, Bush Jr. declared victory from the deck of an aircraft carrier, occupied the country, hunted and executed its leader, and then opened the U.S. treasury to deal with the aftermath. Thousands of Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's died. The occupation was long and difficult, but its end was still premature and left a power vacuum that ISIS raged into, causing even more destruction. Perhaps Iraqi's can say they're better off today than under Hussein, but a terrible cost was paid. Most of the blood was Iraqi, but most of the treasure was American.

The financial drain on the U.S. was extreme enough to expose the world's preeminent superpower as being unable to bring the occupation of a somewhat backwards and minor dictatorship to a successful conclusion. Iraq is not a big country, in either population or area, but it was still too much for the U.S. to control, even with willing allies. This failure made the world realize there were severe limits to what the U.S. can do. Sure, it might defeat the military of a middle or even major power, but occupy and control it? Fat chance!

In the days ahead, the U.S. military is going to bomb anything that moves and looks like it might shoot back, as well as a lot of infrastructure and probably a decent number of civilian targets by mistake (or design). Trump has framed this invasion as being directed towards eliminating Iran's nuclear program, so expect a lot of facilities in close proximity to civilians (and many of those civilians) to be vaporized.

If Trump is listening to his generals even slightly, he will not try to occupy the country. He'll declare victory and move on to whatever outrage is next to maintain his "Flood the zone" strategy and keep the Epstein heat from finally catching up with him. If that's all he does, this will be another war like Bush Sr.'s. Expensive, but not ruinously so. U.S. deaths will be in the hundreds and not the thousands. Iran will most likely fall into the hands of another mullah or descend into chaos, becoming a long-term security quagmire that will probably continue to bleed the U.S. for decades to come. Even if democracy does take root in Iran, it likely won't be a democracy that's friendly to the U.S..

If Trump isn't listening to his generals (who reportedly advised against the invasion to begin with), he might try to occupy Iran. Iran has double the population and four times the land area as Iraq. Unlike Bush Jr., Trump has not even tried to stitch together a coalition to share the costs. It's unlikely that many countries would be dumb enough to sign on now. There's no NATO article 5 pretext to drag in other NATO countries. There isn't even a falsified pretext like WMD's to quiet the howling in the UN. Israel isn't the kind of help the U.S. needs because the U.S. pays most of Israel's military bills to begin with. In short, if Iraq strained the U.S.'s finances close to the breaking point, Iran will ruin them completely. There's absolutely no way the U.S. can afford to occupy Iran.

Even if Trump cuts and runs, this war will ensure American's can't afford socialized medicine for another generation.

> There isn't even a falsified pretext like WMD's

I don’t think anyone believes it, but I’ve heard media reports that ‘unnamed officials’ thought the regime was weeks away from a nuclear weapon.

I think an Article 5 invocation would be a cynical way to destroy NATO with some deniability

So only US selected few countries can have nukes, what about France, UK, India etc?

Not a long time ago, the previous time when USA had bombed Iran, Trump claimed to have destroyed completely anything that Iran could use to make nuclear weapons.

It would be weird (or not?) to contradict himself now by claiming that they were able to make nuclear weapons.

I avoid listening to the current POTUS as it’s hard to make sense of his illogic, but his video said, “ they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland.”

But this is supposedly false per reports.

>There isn't even a falsified pretext like WMD's to quiet the howling in the UN.

30,000 dead protestors.

The source for both was "the state department bribed a guy in the Iraqi/Iranian government and you'll NEVER guess what he told us...."

W didn’t remember Vietnam because he didn’t go and probably never studied history

Iraqi path to democracy isn't really that different from everyone else's.

People tend to forget that various extant democracies, including European ones, mostly didn't precipitate out of thin air by everyone deciding to just be nice to one another. Many now-democratic countries had to fight a war of independence or a civil war, often with involvement of third parties, to get there.

France took about 80 years of violent upheavals from 1789 to 1871 to actually become a democratic republic for good. Germany was even worse. Unification of Italy was a long bloody mess. Poland barely survived the 20th century. Even Swiss direct democracy is an aftermath of a civil war, though in their case, it was a small one.

Democracy isn't an application that people just install and it starts working. It usually takes decades for it to take roots, as people have to slowly abandon the idea that it is just easier to massacre their opponents.

Even the US came to be after a war of independence with a major external factor on their side (the French) and only ended slavery through a nasty civil war.

Iraq isn't really an outlier in that context and Iran wouldn't probably be either.

Exactly this.

But then people look at it after 5 years and say: but it didn’t work!!!

Not acknowledging that all things ever achieved in life by humans were achieved over time by constant trial and error and not giving up.

Always convenient to drop bombs and say “it would have been worse”. With absolutely no proof of that. It’s the stupidest American talking point and I despise other Americans who use that propaganda.

And you frequently fly over to Iraq and explain that to the people there right? They nod in agreement with you. “We had to bomb and occupy your country and kill your citizens just like Saddam did remember? Now you’re better off after our failed occupation left your country. We’ll bomb you anytime; sure it costs us money is and the reason neither of our countries have healthcare but who needs healthcare when you have bombs and propaganda. You’re welcome.”

I went there and asked people about it. It was pretty clear they felt theyd gone through hell.

They were also complaining bitterly about things that got worse thanks to there being a war like corruption and a lack of jobs.

I have no idea who OP talked to nor why they thought the war was so great but it matched nothing of what I saw.

Isn’t it a bit wild you had to confirm with Iraqis that war was bad for their country?

shrug i developed a hobby of visiting countries that are in the news a lot and meeting the locals and talking about their day to day lives. Iraq, Israel/Palestine, North Korea, Venezuela, Saudi, Russia, etc.

I didnt exactly ask Iraqis that question directly and war certainly wasnt the only bad thing in their lives. e.g. a lot of guys would moan that they want to get married but "cant afford it".

but anyways OP's comment set my bullshit-o-meter spinning so fast i got vertigo.

It's not guaranteed to be the same outcome in Iran, we're just rolling the dice again and hoping it is.

> a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors

The US sent Saddam the Bell helicopters to gas the Kurds. US military aid increased after that happened.

The war with a neighbor was with Iran - the country the US just attacked, and which the US encouraged Iraq to fight. That's why Rumsfwld was over there shaking Saddam's hand.

I agree. The military component was a resounding success. The "de-Baathification" was a disaster and gets lumped into the decapitation of Sadaam's regime.

We'll never know the counterfactual, but it seems likely that the banning from public life everyone with ties to the current government was a large contributor to the collapse of the country and rise of the terrorist groups.

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.

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.

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.

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-betw...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Since you quoted the long-term part:

The policies you're naming are still enacted for their expected long-term consequences. That doesn't mean all of them are successful in achieving their goals, sometimes their expectations turn out to be wrong. This can happen with any policy, regardless of whether the goal was short-term of long-term.

If you're talking about the power shift part: Many if not most (including me) believe that slowing of economic growth was inevitable, it simply wasn't a level that could be sustained in the long run. There are plenty of issues in China and plenty of policies that may turn out to have failed - much of it remains to be seen, as again, the goals are long term and we may consider them successful a decade or two from now. But the scientific gap with the rest of the world is widening every day, China is crushing it in that area and the fruits will be reaped. Robotics, every kind of energy, every kind of engineering.

> Certainly what Xi did with Hong Kong made peaceful re-unification with Taiwan very unlikely.

It didn't have an impact. By 2019 the chance was already zero barring black swan events. The chance is still zero barring black swan events.

One would think on HN there would be sophisticated grasp of complex systems than Reddit or what have you, so either there are just as many politically dogmatic/biased people in tech, or political threads are dominated by non-tech users, or what?

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

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.

Plenty of people died under Saddam, too. Do you think the average Iraqi would choose to go back and live under Saddam?

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.

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.

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).

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?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!

Unfortunately the current Iraqi government has a record of torturing people too. You just don't hear about it ever because they're a US client state.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/iraq-people-h...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/19/iraq-chilling-accounts-t...

There was a This American Life story about it which unfortunately I can't find.

You seem to forget that Irak instability was a big part of the reason why we got to deal with ISIS in the first place.

I say that ISIS was worst than Saddam.

ISIS also broke out of countries like Syria, which nobody messed with until after their civil war and the ISIS takeover. Which is to say that the problem isn’t the Iraq war - but Islam. It’s literally called ISIS - and you blame the US for it?

It would be good to read the wiki and understand what ISIS really was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State

Well, Iran is majority muslim. If somehow you've concluded that muslims are simply fundamentally violent and incapable of stable governance and that is the reason why the occupation of iraq failed then...

But I personally think that the reasons why you see violent insurgency after a regime change and foreign occupation is a little more universal to humans than specific to islam.

Everything is linked, Syrian civil War didn't happen out of nowhere.

There was an environment of instability in middle east, some is inherent to these countries, but a big part is because another cointry came in 2003 and decided to make of Irak a failed country by bombing all their infrastructures.

Iraq is not the victim here, my friend. Iraq has willingly implicated itself in multiple wars. Unfortunately for Iraq, it was one war too many. Iraq didn't back down, despite having alternatives. Iraq could've negotiated its way out of a war throughout the entire time, but chose violence instead.

I'm tired of people dunking on the west.

Iraq today is likely a better place to live in than Iraq under Saddam. That's thanks to a painful and costly intervention. Muslims continue messing it up for everybody everywhere, the way they always did, regardless of geography or circumstances, under any pretence and excuse under the sun. West gets blamed for it no matter what. Rinse and repeat. It's getting old.

No one misses Saddam.

Parts of Iraq are much better off, like Kurdistan. Other parts were utterly devastated by our operations, insurgency, sectarian violence, ISIS, and so on. Some people had religious freedom and now live in areas under theocratic control.

When Saddam Hussein was removed, the result was that basically all Iraqi Christians who hadn't fled were murdered. There are probably as many Iraqi Christians in the EU as there are in Iraq now.

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....

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.

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

This will be the start of something that never ends

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.

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.

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.

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