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Comment by csmpltn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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