Difficult question - Ukraine vs Iraq

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Interesting discussion on Reddit by people with more knowledge than I.

Were Iraqis hopeful about the US invasion in 2003?

Back in the day of 9/11 or so, 20 years there was a lot less coverage on events and you couldn’t use a device to watch videos and the news and get the info basically at present time. I mean, on the weather channel, a friend of mine told me the weather was worst than it’s ever been. Now, considering how much worldwide coverage, about what is going on in the world, 24/7, is at the tips of our fingers, everything is blown out of proportion. Mainstream media is not going to want to sort out who the true good/bad guys are. Trust your instincts, as you are your only master.

Trust your instincts??? in an environment where you're bombarded with information and only the most salient and most repeated narrative has a chance of sticking before the next catastrophe wipes away the media landscape and replaces it with an ever new deluge of more horrific images without verified sources??

no. read actual books by actual scholars.

stupid question: why Trump? Trump was a buffoon and did his best to divide the US, but his foreign policy was ... basically non-existent. The positives about that are clear: at least he didn't start a major war.
But compared to Bush, who is responsible for the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, the torture, the detainments without trial, and Obama, whose foreign policy was a continuation of that but with more extrajudicial killings, I'd pick Bush for the comparison with Saddam, not Trump.

From my understanding, Hussain was a dictator and people there were not happy. Plush Bush lied about his reason wanting to invade there and it got voted in. But I remember then people were not happy about the invasion.

Trump’s foreign policy wasn’t coherent, but by any measure is unfavourable to compare to Obama. On drone strikes, Trump escalated their use, and eventually stopped reporting them: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/ ... -s-numbers

Strange to blame Bush for “the mess in Afghanistan” - that mess predates his Presidency by a long way, and the intervention there was essentially a model. The invasion, approved by the UN, was a coalition of nations from three continents. The subsequent occupation was supported by almost everyone, even Russia, and led to the most peaceful period in Afghanistan’s recent history.

The invasion of Iraq could reasonably be compared to Saddam’s invasion of Iran, although I have laid out what I perceive to be some important differences elsewhere.

Where Trump is closer to a dictator than Bush is in things like:

- openly threatening to start a nuclear war

- blackmailing Ukraine to get Zelensky to lie about one of Trump’s political opponents

- pressuring officials to overturn the results of a free and democratic election

I'm not sure how I feel about the drone use. They are clearly a superior weapon, but also dehumanizes the target.

Dehumanization of the target happens in every war.
It's good if the target is not civilian.