Why would US troops risk their lives in the middle of Iraq to simply send a message to the world that the US can invade any country it likes, even for made up reasons, and nobody can stop them?
Clearly nobody actually thinks about it that way. They are professionals and they carry out their legal orders, given to them by a properly constituted government, to the best of their ability.
Yes, even if the orders are to conduct criminal was of aggression. Because at this stage of human history, the rules based international order is a hopeful fantasy.
It seems you're misremembering or discounting the American psyche in the immediate shadow of 9/11.
While later proven to be false, accusations of WMD, and the insinuation they could be used against the US and/or Europe, were widely believed and likely highly motivating to the average American GI in 2003.
I know men and women who enthusiastically signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq who had little prior intention to join the military.
> accusations of WMD, and the insinuation they could be used against the US and/or Europe, were widely believed
Were they widely believed? I know I was told they were widely believed, but I never saw polls that confirmed that. Colin Powell was literally laughed at for claiming there were WMDs when addressing the UN and the UN inspectors were very clear there were none.
They were largely debunked in realtime. The western media (I believe the Guardian specifically) published the receipts on the artillery balloon filling vehicles that Britain sold Iraq that the US/UK were trying to pass of as vehicles of mysterious origin that had to be mobile WMD labs before Powell’s presentation to the UNSC. At which meeting, other US allegations were debunked by UN inspectors. Heck, the British government memos about the way intelligence was being shaped to sell the war were leaked before the war the started.
The American/British public went along with the war because of racist hysteria whipped up after 9/11, not any evidence that was uncontroversial at the time but later debunked.
It's often sold as intelligence or media failure or clever executive deception that brought the public and lawmakers along and was later seen through, but that's largely B.S. The lies were documented in fairly stark terms before the war for the public and lawmakers, and they chose to go to war anyway because they didn't care about the facts. But narrowly focusing the blame on the media and the Bush Administration/Blair government lets everyone else absolve themselves.
I wasn't attempting to relitigate the events of the 2000's. I didn't support the war at the time.
It's important to understand the simple fact that a majority of Americans at the time believed the war was just[1], and that the government spent many months justifying and readying the nation and its soldiers for war. This is an important factor that helps explain the high morale of American troops at the start of the war.
In the anti-war movement I can assure you that they were not believed. And with good reason, no evidence was presented. That is why we protested in huge numbers before the war began.
If you go back and review press interviews with donald rumsfeld at the time you can see that even he could not provide evidence which convinced the journalists. Regardless, the media did their patriotic dtuy and reported them as fact.
Check out the news clip of Rumsfelds "unknown unknowns". A journalist asks: "That is all very interesting but is there any evidence, because that would elevate our bind faith in to something actually reasonable and fact based?" Rumsfeld had nothing to offer.
Well when you're there you risk your life for you friends to your left and right. I'm sure it also helped that the Iraqis welcomed the US and Saddam was a brutal tyrant.
> The total number of deaths and disappearances related to repression during this period is unknown, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 to 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch, with the great majority of those occurring as a result of the Anfal genocide in 1988 and the suppression of the uprisings in Iraq in 1991
> Ukraine is not only bigger but some 50 percent more populous than Iraq, and the Iraqi population included many millions—Kurds, Christians, Yezidis, Shabak, and many of the Shia—who broadly supported the coalition forces throughout our time there. Only a minority of the Iraqi population comprised or supported the Sunni extremists and insurgents and Iranian-supported Shia militia. Though they did, to be sure, prove to be very formidable enemies.
> "Iraq, today, 10 years on from the war, from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is not what the Iraqi people hoped for and expected. We hoped for an inclusive democracy, an Iraq that is at peace with itself and at peace with its neighbors," Salih said. "To be blunt, we are far from that."
> "But," he added, "it's important to understand where we started from. ... Literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were sent to mass graves. Ten years on from the demise of Saddam Hussein, we're still discovering mass graves across Iraq. And Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein—the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein."
Glad you mentioned the goalpost moving. If we come back to whether wars of aggression are justified or not. Does a happy outcome justify them?
One interesting example here is in the 80's people could say "South Korea might be a brutal military dictatorship, but it is doing well economically, and therefore that justifies the Korean war"
Which is interesting of course, because in the 1960's, when North Korea was ahead economically, I'm sure North Koreans had the same post-hoc justification.
And if you look in to how US support for the Ba'ath party was justified... Strikingly similar but with the added dimension of US security interests vis a vis maintaining or restoring the Iranian dictatorship.
That all that brings us full circle to whether the Iranian revolution is justified by having got rid of a regime at similarly torturous as Saddam's.
The Iraqi insurgent demands were for the US to promptly leave (not occupy the nation for over a decade) and they were also happy to have Saddam Hussein's regime gone. The mass population of Iraq was very clearly not against the US removing the regime either. The primary disastrous mistake the US made was the very poorly planned occupation and dismantling of most of the existing government structures (amplifying the chaos and civil war risks).
Edit: but I will add that an insurgent is somebody who is fighting against a legitimately constituted government, which did not exist in Iraq, so technically they are resisters.
1.American soldiers are hired professionals, paid well to do a job. Most of the Russians are conscripts which are treated like shit and don’t want to be there.
2.US media had hyped up hatred towards Saddam for months. Soldiers got lots of hate training before being deployed . They got trained to dehumanize and hate Iraqis. This was very effective but backfired because it led to trigger happy soldiers shooting and blowing up way too many civilians, thus undermining the war effort.
3. Iraq is a far away country Americans cannot relate to or empathized with. Ukraine is a country many Russians are strongly linked to with family, culture and language. This is like the US attacking Canada. How do you think that would go? Americans would hesitate a lot more to shoot Canadians than Iraqis.
While I don't disagree at all on the broad points you are making there is definitely some nuance there.
I personally believe that the US military is an outlier in terms of it's professionalism, but it's not completely and uniformly professional, there are lots of people coerced in to joining to avoid jail time and what not. Many standards were lowered to increase recruitment during Iraq war. Recruitment targets disadvantaged communities, etc. But I tend to think that there are other forces countering ill-discipline such as training, esprit de corps, "fighting for the guy next to you." I don't know about the disposition of the Russian military but am skeptical of the notion that it's a rag tag bunch of drunks and fuckups :) I guess time will tell.
As for the excessive violence in Iraq. A lot of the excesses came directly from the top. Shock and awe was apparently a fireworks display with no military rationale. It was violence purely for entertainment value and how it would look on TV. It doesn't seem comparable to the Russian approach which, while everything they do is a war crime, they still need to be conscious of all the international scrutiny they face. I don't think they would be able to start levelling neighbourhoods from the air while boasting about how it would terrorize the population without facing severe condemnation from all sides. Shock and awe was condemned by all sides, but the US seemed completely immune to it and carried on regardless. By all accounts, the distrust built up by the acts of terrorism turned Iraqis quickly against the invasion and made the occupation much more costly than it would have been otherwise (of course, other factors contributed hugely, eg. the corruption and incompetence of the CPA, etc.).
While I agree on the race and culture thing, it's also hard to ignore the fact that a large US political movement is committed to wiping out or overpowering roughly half of their own population based on their political beliefs. The events of January 6 should really have opened up peoples eyes to this. We are quite capable of dehumanizing people of the same race. We've been doing it for as far back as the fossil record goes.
In that case at least Saddam really was a tyrant. Obviously pick your poison but you could make a case of intervention in Iraq - i.e. if it were led by Blair rather than Bush I think we'd be reflecting differently, although probably still negatively
Doesn't matter who leads who, invading sovereign territory means invading sovereign territory.
One of the massive mistakes in US foreign policy after September 2001 was to effectively re-legitimise old-school military power, occupating countries "just because we can", without even a shadow of UN mandate. It makes it very hard to rhetorically argue against others doing the same now.
Right. If an argument can be made for the US overthrowing Saddam. Why can't an argument be made for Iran doing it?
Iran was invaded by Saddam. Why didn't we support them if Saddam was so bad? That is a rhetorical question which really needs no response because the response is: the badness of Saddam has no bearing on the question. That is very obvious in this case, but not obvious when we are seeking self-serving justifications for our own wars.
>In that case at least Saddam really was a tyrant.
You should research a bit what life in Iraq was like prior to GW1 under Saddam's leadership. Most - in fact, nearly all - ME leaders are 'tyrants' according to Western standards but some are rewarded with arms and some are struck down.
Literally nobody seems to care about whatever Saudi Arabia gets up to in human rights violations, for example. People sometimes bring up its repression of women, and I think I've heard people bring that up more than Yemen, for example.
It’s different the US was actually attacked whilst not by Iraq ofc Saddam well was Saddam…
Also a key factor here that most Americans don’t get greeting cards from Iraqis over Easter you’ll be hard pressed to find a single Ukrainian or Russian family that doesn’t have relatives across the border.
An analogy to this situation would be if the US decided to invade Canada tomorrow it would be much harder to explain to the troops or to motivate them.
The US should not have done that, and most of us know that. That has no bearing on and is no excuse for what is happening right now.
But at the time you speak of, there was a concerted disinformation scheme which led many people, likely including troops and certainly including the US Congress, to believe that Iraq was becoming a nuclear threat led by a power-hungry man. Troops probably believed they were fighting for the freedom and safety of the world.
I hope nothing in my comment could be interpreted as excusing criminal wars of aggression. I am just trying to understand and make sense of why people tacitly support, or even actively participate in them.
> I am just trying to understand and make sense of why people tacitly support, or even actively participate in them.
That is a huge topic which I cannot hope to explain (or mostly understand). If you look at the shift in US political ideology in the last 5-10 years, particularly during the Trump era (which still continues), it is clear that some masterful manipulation scheme has been operating effectively.
It is clearly possible to groom a significant percentage of a population to believe in absolute lies. This happened in the US after 9/11 (and surely in previous periods); but it was never so effective as it has been lately. The war in Iraq was easy to justify to Americans, even without WMD lies. Hussein was a very bad man by our standards. That alone, of course, does not justify invasion. So other threats must be illustrated, legitimate or not.
But to the point of understanding, you have to realize that people (particularly older ones?) get their information from very few sources; and they communicate with the same few people. It is much easier to sell disinformation and have them repeat it amongst themselves than for younger, more internet-active people.
The rise of Trumpist political forces is extremely alarming. But they stem from somewhere: mistrust in institutions which correlates hugely with support for people like Trump. If people cannot trust their leaders, they cannot trust institutions, they cannot trust reality itself, it leads them to exhaustion, defeatism, and towards supporting personalist rulers. When Trump lies he says "well everyone else is lying, the media is fake news, the government is the deep-state, but when I lie, at least I am honest that I am a liar" and that gives him a legitimacy in the eyes of his followers because all the complex issues boil down to "do you trust big brother or not?".
So yes, the new era is worse than the old Bush era where Rumsfeld was a circus clown feeding us bullshit, but behind the scenes the institutions basically functioned properly. Because in that world that we have left behind now, we still had wars of aggression, we still had robber barons, but the institutions had a veneer of legitimacy which the public, and the people in the institutions believed in enough that you had countervailing political forces that could protect you from the worst excesses. But that past was a mirage, because during that time, the leaders were draining out that trust like siphoning gas out of your tank (eg. in the Iraq war, NAFTA, on and on..), and they were trading it for political power and dollars.
Now the tank is empty, and US institutions are extremely vulnerable to collapse. And I think that Trump was just the last drop of gas escaping.
If you actually pay close attention to what Donald Rumsfeld said and wrote, he wasn't a circus clown at all. He was actually quite intelligent and sincere. But he was also completely wrong about everything important. Is that better or worse?
I actually agree with you about him being intelligent and sincere. I am actually fascinated by people like him.
The fact that he believes those idiotic things while having a seemingly very reasonable belief system around the goals and functions of the institutions he serves, and what his role is in them, is something I find quite darkly comical. Actually I think his sincerity makes his one-off performances laugh-out-loud funny.
Watching the Errol Morris documentary with him is tragic and comic at the same time. I mean, take for instance his view on the Vietnam war. He goes from a very touching and thoughtful personal recollection of the evacuation to Saigon to telling us that his reflection over the entire decades-long US involvement in a conflict that murdered 4 million people as being "some things work out, some things don't." And this appears to be after quite a lot of prompting. It is profound, and inane in equal measure. Hannah Arendt would be slack-jawed.
> believe that Iraq was becoming a nuclear threat led by a power-hungry man
I presume you mean chemical threat? Let's not forget that Saddam seems to have done his best to encourage that belief, and actually had a verified history of gassing the Kurds. As someone who was opposed to the Iraq war at the time, I'm still not sure history has fully weighed in on that particular (mis)adventure... the Kurds certainly are entitled to their strong endorsement.
The minor complication there is that the US defence establishment produced intelligence reports (available under FOIA) blaming the Iranians for chemical attacks. I think it wasn't until 2002 when the US intelligence agencies finally switched to publicly/officially recognising Saddam as the culprit.
"Legal orders" are defined by the country giving them (in this case the US) which are a combination of the various treaties that the US has signed and laws. For instance, no soldier can legally be ordered to violate the Geneva convention, and they can be court martial for following such an order.
A war of aggression is about international law, and is commonly not considered something that determines if an order is legal in any military.
Clearly nobody actually thinks about it that way. They are professionals and they carry out their legal orders, given to them by a properly constituted government, to the best of their ability.
Yes, even if the orders are to conduct criminal was of aggression. Because at this stage of human history, the rules based international order is a hopeful fantasy.