[1a527dd5]

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.

[baxtr]

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.

[AlecSchueler]

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.

[seydor]

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

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

[regularization]

> 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.

[inglor_cz]

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.

[golden-face]

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

[righthand]

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.”

[righthand]

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.

[beloch]

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.

[paxys]

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.

[judahmeek]

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.

[avaika]

> 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.

[wfdsf2]

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.

[deaux]

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.

[calf]

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?

[csmpltn]

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

[dfadsadsf]

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.

[aucisson_masque]

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.

[impossiblefork]

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.

[acjohnson55]

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.

[PolygonSheep]

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.

[softwaredoug]

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

[heavyset_go]

This will be the start of something that never ends

[Bender]

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.

[jmyeet]

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....

[TulliusCicero]

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.

[Rapzid]

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.