Was able to zoom in on the lower object.
DoubleG
3297
Today’s hate read. One of the main pushers of the WMD theory would like you to know the war in Iraq was good, actually.
Timex
3298
Really? What did this guy do? I don’t remember ever really hearing about this Eli Lake guy as an important name.
DoubleG
3299
He stands out to me – I remember him still pushing WMD claims into like 2006.
Timex
3300
Into 2006, or starting in 2006?
I just looked him up on Wikipedia, and the reference you seem to be taking about is an article that another author complained about, from 2006… But writing an article in 2006 can’t really be some main promoter of rationale for a war starting 3 years prior, can it?
Honestly, I’m genuinely asking the question here. I’ve never heard of this guy related to the Iraq war before.
DoubleG
3301
Into 2006. Here’s him in the national review when we were only in Afghanistan.
Timex
3302
Gotcha, so is that article you posted worth reading?
(I honestly have no idea who that guys is)
DoubleG
3303
Not if you like yourself? I labeled it a hate read, it’s interesting/infuriating to me to see somebody who helped push a bullshit war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians turn around and argue that they’re much better off.
Timex
3304
Ok, well for the sake of discussion since you posted the article, is it possible that Iraq actually is better off now than it was in 2003?
What are the metrics we are using to evaluate it?
It’s easy to look at the costs of the Iraq war, and forget the state of Iraq prior to that war. It was pretty horrific. Saddam Hussein is singularly responsible for more deaths in the middle east than any other person, I believe.
Iraq actually has a functional democratic government now, right?
I don’t know much about Eli Lake, but based off of his face I hate the guy:
Ugh. $2.4 trillion and hundreds of thousands dead. If you’re going to say its better off because all comparisons are on the table, then did your neighborhood that spent $6.4 million to kill one Iraqi get its money’s worth, vs other local spending?
Or even if it has to be military, because ‘jobs’ or other reasons, the same military spending could have been spent on disaster relief an order of magnitude higher, and saved lives and economies rather than destroy? The US provided $5B to Haiti after the earthquake, great but how about $50 billion, just 2% of the cost(!)?
Discussions of history are fine of course, as long as people recognize that Iraq was an astronomical blunder and any discussion of outcomes has to be in that context.
Timex
3307
But you seem to be making the mistake of thinking that the alternative is no Iraqis dead.
Hussein committed constant atrocities against his own people, for decades. Even if you were to attribute blame to the US for all of the Iraqis killed in the Iraq war (despite most being killed by America’s enemies), Hussein still killed more.
Certainly we spent a mountain of money, but at the end of the day, I think the question of whether Iraq is actually better off now than where they were under Hussein’s rule is certainly not obvious to me.
I think that it can be considered a mistake, while still resulting in an outcome that was better than the status quo at the time. Certainly the specifics of the execution could be criticized either way.
But I think the question if whether Iraq is better off now than it was on 2003 is, at least, an open question. I don’t think it’s clear that they are worse off.
Better off how? How would you measure it? How would you attribute that improvement to any particular thing?
I mean, French people are surely better off now than they were in 1938, but I don’t think that means the invasion and occupation they endured from 1939-1944 is the helpful reason. Does it?
I think Iraq became better in the worst way possible.
Just like I think the US became better after the Civil War in a bad way. (Although, the death of racists and slave holders doesn’t really bother my conscience at all).
Like, sure, better, but better than what possible alternatives?
Timex
3310
That was indeed a question I specifically asked.
Certainly in terms of things like democraticfreedom, they are better off now. In terms of life expectancy, they’re better off now. I think those things can pretty clearly be attributed to the regime change.
I think the flip side of that question could also be asked, right? Is anything worse now than it was in 2003? I honestly don’t know, maybe there are metrics which have declined.
I think the biggest impediment to this kind of discussion is that it’s naturally hard for us to separate the actions from the result. There’s an inclination for us to say that, through some notion of the ends justifying the means, that if the outcome is an improvement then the action must have been correct. I don’t think that’s true, or at least, it’s not true that the action is beyond serious criticism.
This is an interesting way of putting it, which I’m not really able to disagree with.
Istari6
3311
The question isn’t so much whether Iraq is better or worse off. For $2.4T spent, I’d hope it would be at least marginally better off. The real question (for me) is the opportunity cost of that $2.4T. It was a terrible investment of blood and treasure by any measurement of outcome. When I think of what else our society could have done with those years, those young lives, and the enormous wealth we poured into the sands of Iraq… it was a catastrophic mistake.
Thanks, I think that angle of your inquiry and position makes it much more reasonable. I interpreted an element of “George Floyd’s family is better off now, so it was a good thing right?” Which you didn’t mean.
It is interesting part of history that the need to rebuild can improve quality of life well above the prior baseline. Not necessarily (Afghanistan) but sometimes.
Yeah, I’m saying it’s unanswerable. If there isn’t any way to measure whether the invasion and occupation made Iraqis better off, I don’t really know the point of posing the question. We know the invasion and subsequent occupation was a pretty catastrophic blunder, and that it did a lot of harm to Iraqis and to Iraq’s infrastructure and economy. Isn’t that enough to decide the invasion was bad?
ShivaX
3314
Not to Godwin, but you could make the same argument about most of say WW2.
I think Japan and Germany ended up better off in the long run and they’d likely agree.
Now is that the case with Iraq? It’s hard to say until more time has passed, though still being a brutal dictatorship under Hussein was so shitty, it’s probably likely.
Timex
3315
Why would it be unanswerable?
Again, there are concrete improvements to the lives of Iraqis today, compared to their lives under Saddam Hussein’s absurdly brutal regime.
The fact that they have a functional democracy and can control their own destiny now is, at least to me, objectively better than what they had under Hussein.
