
Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country - enitihas
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-anniversary-.html
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aaomidi
Content such as this really doesn't belong on this forum. It redditifes this
forum for conversation.

I've also noticed people jump to attacking each other quite a lot more in the
comments of pieces like this.

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jfaucett
agreed. Still, I think of myself as an optimist and would like to think we
HNers could civilly discuss any topic that popped up on HN :)

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jfaucett
This is the opinion page of NYT. I wonder how far this perspective wanders
from reality. If there's anything I've learned from studying the Arab-Israeli
conflict its that most individual perspectives provide a universally bad
account for causes, effects, and relations in a given situation, while
simultaneously offering a rich amount of insight into human bias, error,
emotion, and self deception.

That is, however, not to say that that is what this account is.

On that note, does anyone have a suggestion for the most non-biased sources
i.e. books for understanding the conflict? I realize it's probably going to be
very hard right now since distance in terms of time usually leads to more
accurate and less biased analyses of a historical event.

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jdlyga
American here. Never supported sending troops over there. Not a lot of people
did. But Bush did it anyway. Didn't vote for him. Sad to see what it did to
people.

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RickJWag
Thankfully, we avoided war-supporting Hillary Clinton.

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webXL
Man, that's depressing. While I never argued for invasion, I deeply regret
supporting those who waged the war thinking that lack of support would lead to
a quagmire and a situation that was worse than before, and that was pretty
awful. The more I read about the war, I came to the conclusion it had
absolutely no chance of being anything else. It's got to be one of the worst
cases of collective sunk cost fallacy.

Empires are evil. America is one of the least evil, but that doesn't justify
its empire. It might have been necessary to defeat Nazism, and to hold back
the spread of communism, but we are squandering our future's prosperity to
accomplish what exactly? I could understand if it was a question for survival,
but American citizens enjoy so much security it's ridiculous, even 15 years
ago. Even with all the mass shootings.

Boycott news media. Boycott national politics. The world will be better off.

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redblacktree
We were defending the petrodollar in Iraq. i.e. attempting to maintain
American hegemony. Viewing all recent conflicts through that lens really helps
to understand. "Yellow cake" and the like is just how it was sold.

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merraksh
' _Some credible estimates put the number [of people who died since 2003] at
more than one million._ ' ' _The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the
United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime.
Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been
rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac
citizenry. [...] The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on
doing what they do._ '

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ikeboy
>I left Iraq a few months after the 1991 Gulf War and went to graduate school
in the United States, where I’ve been ever since.

Love the ambiguity here.

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z_open
There's no ambiguity though.

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ikeboy
On my first read I interpreted it as they'd been stuck in grad school for
almost 3 decades, which seemed almost believable.

It's one of those context dependant sentences - if it had said since 2016,
then that interpretation would be most likely correct.

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mankash666
Why oh why is this flagged? Does HN lack the stomach for civil debate about a
contentious issue?

For those trigger happy flaggers - the responsibility ordained on you
shouldn't be abused. Reddit will devolve into partisan piffle, HN IS the only
space that's remotely capable of civility. So, don't flag - encourage
diversity of thought!!

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gravis7777
Wonder if this guy will also apologize for the horrible things Iraq did to
both Iran in the early 80s and Kuwait in the 90s.

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jmkb
It's a little odd to hold a civilian citizen of a despotic regime accountable
for his government's actions.

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bogomipz
And similarly it's a little odd to hold an entire country of 350 million
people responsible for the self serving decisions made by a small cabal of
powerful oil people(Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.)

Similarly was the entire country of Iraq responsible for horrific
transgressions against the Kurds, Iran and Kuwait or just a small cabal of
corrupt people with real power?

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jmkb
I guess "Fifteen years ago, American armed forces and American mercenaries
destroyed my country at the bidding of the democratically elected leaders, but
with only partial consent of the citizens" was too wordy.

To be serious, blaming an "entire country" is a _little_ more understandable
if that country is a functioning democracy. Of course, if it's actually an
oligarchy where the government is above the law and many voters are
disenfranchised and easily manipulated by unchecked propaganda, then... well,
that's frustrating.

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bogomipz
>"To be serious, blaming an "entire country" is a little more understandable
if that country is a functioning democracy."

No it would be "more understandable" if that country was a direct democracy
and the people actually voted on the resolution. The US is a representative
democracy and often resembles a plutocracy at that.

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jmkb
Yes, compañero, this is pretty much what I was getting at. I said it was a
little more understandable, but I didn't mean to imply it was correct.

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greatamerican
So is the United States this man's country, or is Iraq this man's country?

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dnc
Neither most likely. I think that this man is an apatrid and that he doesn't
have a real home judging by a similar string of events in my life. My country
was economically devastated due to unfavorable Geo-political circumstances and
I eventually had to choose to move, rather than to prolong meaningless
suffering. I was lucky to have a choice. Although, I'd say it was not as
dramatic as in the case of Iraq. Anyhow, I feel as if I don't belong anywhere.

