Difficult question - Ukraine vs Iraq

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Pepe
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03 Mar 2022, 8:39 pm

slam_thunderhide wrote:

magz wrote:

slam_thunderhide wrote:

It seems highly likely that Putin would settle for independence for the Russian-speaking regions of Donbas and Luhansk, and the guaranteed neutrality of the rest of Ukraine along similar lines to that of Finland (and in fact similar to how Ukraine was prior to 2014).

By shelling Kiev, bombing Zhytomyr and blocking Mariupol? Get a map. If things were contained to the "republics", the West would have likely just send a note - like it did over Crimea or Abhasia.

Yes - Putin could not get a guarantee of Ukranian neutrality via diplomatic means after years of trying, so he decided to force the issue by invading the entire country. I'm not saying I support it; I'm saying it's understandable, and the West shares a large amount of the blame. And to anyone who thinks the Russians want to waste their resources occupying Ukraine indefinitely, I would suggest they are mistakenly projecting America's behaviour in Afghanistan onto a different conflict.

pootin had the massive delusion that Ukraine "proper" favoured being reunited with Russia.
Clearly he was wrong when the Iranians Ukrainians repelled his initial invasion.

pootin has eggsky on his face and his humiliation will make has made him all the more determined and feral.

The skunk has spoken.

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03 Mar 2022, 8:42 pm

slam_thunderhide wrote:

kraftiekortie wrote:

Serbia was committing well-documented genocide against Bosnians.

There should have been intervention within the Rwandan Genocide, too.

I was referring more to NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 during the Kosovan conflict, but it's true they also bombed the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Your comment is just further evidence of how so many people seem to believe that the 'good guys' in every conflict are whoever the US government declares them to be. Are we really supposed to believe that the Bosnian Muslims or Croats never did anything bad in that war?

There have been numerous posts condemning the US invasion of Iraq.
I am responsible for a number of them.

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06 Mar 2022, 12:11 pm

Seems this thread was masterfully killed, but I'll resurrect it here by saying that, being American, I still have a hard time speaking out publicly about this invasion because to me it seems so similar to what the US did to Iraq and largely got away with i.e. not becoming an international pariah, not being economically sanctioned.

As for those who've said that Saddam was a bona fide bad guy whom nobody mourns, I would say yes he was a brutal dictator (although how much worse than Trump I wouldn't know) but in retrospect, I can't help feeling that war propaganda disseminated via mainstream media at the time exaggerated the brutality of his rule and overlooked the fact that millions of Iraqis (if not in fact the majority) actually supported him.

I can recall Iraqis holding their thumbs up at Americans as they rolled into Baghdad and being told this was confirmation that Baghdadis welcomed the Americans as liberators. This article from 19 years ago calls that into question.

As for Biden, I believe he is doing what he has to do in response to the invasion. It would be nice if he could apologize to Iraq for what happened there, but I am not naïve enough to think it possible, just as I am not naïve enough to think Bernie Sanders could have prevented all the problems the US has faced over the last year, had he been nominated and elected.

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magz
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06 Mar 2022, 12:16 pm

I'd really love someone from Iraq or a neighbouring country to pop up here and speak their perspective.
Because I know Ukrainian perspective right now too well.

After all it should be primarily about the people directly affected, shouldn't it?

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The_Walrus
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06 Mar 2022, 12:46 pm

MaxE wrote:

Saddam:

- invaded Iran, starting an eight-year war, including the use of poison gas upon Kurdish settlements
- invade Kuwait, starting a much shorter war
- killed at least 50,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign
- expelling the Feyli Kurds to Iran; at least 25,000 killed
- banned citizens from leaving without posting collateral. Banned women from leaving the country unless accompanied by a male relative.
- suppressed uprisings among the Shia community in 1991 through indiscriminate mass execution, with 200 known mass graves containing up to 10,000 people each (much lower on average)
- restricted full participation in civil society to the 8% of the country who were members of his political party
- widespread use of torture, including of journalists and dissidents
- made sodomy a capital offence

Saddam was much, much worse than Trump. It’s possible 50% of the population supported him, but that doesn’t legitimise genocide or dictatorship or torture.

I’ve known Iraqis have wildly different perspectives upon the war but none who were apologists for Saddam. No Western leader has come close to that level of evil since Franco died.

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06 Mar 2022, 1:06 pm

VegetableMan wrote:

We're occupying a third of Syria ar the moment

In a thread filled with stupid claims, this is the stupidest. People can disagree about morality, but this is a blatant factual inaccuracy that I find it hard to imagine anyone falling for.

The US only has about 900 troops stationed in Syria as part of the fight against IS. They control almost no territory. https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/23 ... -to-remain

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06 Mar 2022, 1:14 pm

The_Walrus wrote:

VegetableMan wrote:

We're occupying a third of Syria ar the moment

I (the OP) apologize if I've made any stupid claims.

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06 Mar 2022, 2:31 pm

The_Walrus wrote:

VegetableMan wrote:

We're occupying a third of Syria ar the moment

If you actually do more research, you'd find that it's pretty common knowledge that, despite only having 900 troops in the country, it does account for about a third of Syria.

Here's just one from The Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics ... -in-syria/

It's an illegal occupation as most of the U.S. midadventures in the ME over the past 20 years have been.

I can no longer tolerate apologists for these wars.

When it comes to stupid statements, you are the king. You actually stated that the U.S. was arming "moderate rebels " in Syria which came directly from the U.S. State Department. The CIA admitted we were arming ISIS and al Qaida -' in the NYT, no less.

I try to be as kind as I can with you these days, but you certainly don't make it easy.

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06 Mar 2022, 2:37 pm

Deleted. (For some reason the delete option didn't appear.)

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Last edited by VegetableMan on 06 Mar 2022, 2:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.

magz
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06 Mar 2022, 2:40 pm

Please, I've decided not to moderate talk about things that affect me personally but refrain from personal attacks.

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The_Walrus
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06 Mar 2022, 2:49 pm

VegetableMan wrote:

The_Walrus wrote:

VegetableMan wrote:

We're occupying a third of Syria ar the moment

The claims you are making are contradicted by the articles you are posting. It isn’t referring to territory occupied by the US - 900 troops clearly can’t hope to occupy that sort of area - but to the area occupied by the SDF and the YPG, who 1) are moderate rebels, and 2) are Syrian. Are you condemning Syrians occupying Syria just because they’re allied to the US?

So, either the US is supporting moderate Syrian rebels who control a third of the country, or it isn’t supporting moderate Syrian rebels. Which is it?

What do you propose the US should do instead? Withdraw and allow Assad or ISIS to slaughter the Kurds? Are you pro-Kurds, pro-ISIS, or pro-Assad? There are real human lives at stake here, as Trump found out when he withdrew too early.

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06 Mar 2022, 2:55 pm

You obviously didn't read the article to the end. Enough said.

Have a nice day!

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06 Mar 2022, 3:16 pm

MaxE wrote:

The_Walrus wrote:

VegetableMan wrote:

We're occupying a third of Syria ar the moment

I (the OP) apologize if I've made any stupid claims.

I thought the OP was reasonable, or better than that. Questioning whether double standards exist, without excusing Putin, is valuable, even if I myself would come to a slightly different conclusion. You were asking good questions and challenging pre-conceptions.

The Trump-Saddam comparison was… misguided. Trump hasn’t actively supported ethnic cleansing or execution of his opponents. But while it was maybe a bit stupid, it’s also fairly benign. Ignorance of the depths of evil Saddam sunk to is entirely reasonable for a Westerner - after all, there are a lot of people who the US has opposed on pretty flimsy grounds, and I know I can’t immediately sort them perfectly into neat piles.

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06 Mar 2022, 5:03 pm

VegetableMan wrote:

Deleted. (For some reason the delete option didn't appear.)

That is because that naughty girl magz posted before you could.
You can only delete your post if it is the last one in the thread.

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07 Mar 2022, 2:21 am

Sorry :oops:

Back to the OP - I have very different perspectives on the two wars: in Iraq, we were just an unimportant USA ally; in Ukraine, things are happening here and impacting us directly.

That said, when trying to remember Iraq and what I was thinking and feeling at the time, I remembered the sarcastic term "exporting democracy" for USA wars.

The difference is, Ukrainian democracy is growing locally, despite all the Russian attempts to nip it in the bud.

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MaxE
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07 Mar 2022, 7:56 am

The_Walrus wrote:

MaxE wrote:

The_Walrus wrote:

VegetableMan wrote:

We're occupying a third of Syria ar the moment

I (the OP) apologize if I've made any stupid claims.

I'm not convinced Trump is any less malign than Saddam but we can agree to disagree on that.

But having accepted there was some sort of moral imperative to remove him from power, was the US attack the right approach? I don't think that Bush and Cheney did this for purely altruistic reasons. But then how should it be done? I submit that our world is not properly organized to deal with such a situation in a morally defensible manner. Perhaps we have to just learn to deal with having such people in our world.

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