this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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If you adopt a specific outlook, the duplicity is less stark.
Russia is attacking a sovereign nation and when they took land, they took people. To most, that makes them the bad guys.
Backing away from that and making this a geopolitical chess game, both players have coaches. Sounds fair.
Geopolitics is never about fairness. The greater good is left to those who have powers. Iraq was a sovereign nation; but attacked, causing the deaths of their citizen, for no legitimate casus bellli. Just invent a reason, how about WMD? Yeah, that's good enough. And Iraqi are still left to obscurity and there's nothing they could do about it.
Iraq was absolutely fucked, but what Russia is doing in Ukraine is open genocide. Their media and politicians constantly talk about eliminating Ukrainian identity. The US media and politicians constantly talked about bringing democracy to Iraq (which it still kind of has).
The situations are comparable, but they are very different. An honest commentator would acknowledge the horrors of both if pressed, while also being able to qualify and separate that horror.
USA didn't bring democracy to Iraq. They destroyed it. They fired all of Saddam's army and then wondered why groups like ISIS gained hold. That constant media frenzy about "we're winning", Bush's speech, WMDs, and the de-Baathification was full on propaganda. The best type of propaganda is the type where you don't notice it and that you think you're immune to it.
Both USA and Russia lied about their premises. They both use "liberation" and "freeing the people" as their pathetic excuse for invading a country.
It's the people who suffer these wars (yes, Russian people too. Not all of them support the war, and i speculate that younger generation doesn't support it). The governments just get their big piles of money.