Because you’re not answering it?
Houngan
3317
Eh, but you realize that by saying that something as nebulous as “better” means the onus is on you to define it, and when it comes to the entire gestalt of a country’s population and culture, that’s a big ask. You might be right. I honestly don’t know. But I would be very leery of making assertions around such a thing because then I might have to back it up.
For a more local example, tell me if Louisville, KY is better or worse following and because of our season of protests in 2020. What are your parameters? What is your data? How am I, personally, doing vs. other residents?
It’s too complicated a question with too many branching paths and interlocking variables for us to answer with certainty, and really we can only answer with general probabilities and suppositions. E.g. maybe a kid who was killed in the resulting civil war would have cured cancer or invented Amazon2. It’s a minuscule probability, but it’s not impossible that there was a world shaking genius among the dead. Or maybe without the discrediting of Bush and the NeoCons from the invasion, the Republican party never turns to Trump. We don’t know for sure. We can make guesses and suppositions, but it’s difficult to say what the state of Iraq and the world would have been if we had not gone ahead with the invasion. Would Iraq have been under sanctions and a no-fly-zone for the full 20 years? Would Saddam have naturally expired or been couped? Would a part or the whole of the country manage to overthrow his rule? Lot of different pages in this CYOA.
What we can estimate are the costs of the invasion. It cost thousands of US lives, and an order of magnitude more soldiers who were injured or otherwise damaged by the war. It cost the US an immense amount of soft power, it damaged the international order, and it cost the US government enormous amounts of trust both internationally and from its own citizens. It also cost us an unimaginable amount of money. E.g. if Bush had looked at 9/11 and gone “this shows that we need to be energy independent, and so I am directing $2.4T to be spent constructing new nuclear power plants”, we’d all be using carbon-free energy to read this and looking back at Bush as an understated genius. Instead we used 9/11 as a pretext for war and to double down on oil and gas.
For the other issue of Iraqi democracy, they’re not doing too well at the moment:
"Iraq’s score in the years 2018 until 2021 was between 43 and 48 (on a 100-point-scale), which qualified as “difficult”. but in the year 2022, Iraq’s score sank to 28.59 placing them in the lowest category qualified as “very serious”.
As a result, Iraq’s lowest-scoring category is government functioning, with a score of zero. Iraq had the second-lowest score in the civil freedoms category, with a score of 1.18, down from 1.76 in 2019. The poor grade is due in part to lockdown limitations (which have had a global impact on civil rights), but it is also due to claims of increased usage of arbitrary detentions and allegations of torture being used to get confessions from suspected terrorists (including members of Islamic State and al-Qaida). Security personnel and armed militias, in particular, have been accused of employing oppressive techniques to quell protests, including the use of live bullets. Due to still-intermittent protest action, Iraq retains relatively high rankings in both the political involvement and political culture categories.[
Timex
3319
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But we generally have measures that we use to define the standard of living for people, right? Freedom, life expectancy, access to education, security, etc.
I guess by those normal measures, is Iraq better off than it was? This doesn’t establish that such a change is the result of the conflict, that would be left to be determined, but it seems like the first step would be to establish whether things have gotten better by the metrics we generally use. It does seem like most of those metrics have in fact improved.
This doesn’t really seem like a compelling argument, because it applies equally to all possible actions. Maybe a kid died in the civil war who would would have grown up to be super robot Hitler and destroy the earth.
I don’t think we can really do anything with imagined fictions that could have happened, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t evaluate anything.
Some of those quotes from the wiki page are odd…I mean, you wrote one section talking about the scores given to Iraq by reporters without borders, on the topic of press freedom… But even with that relatively low score, it’s infinitely better than it was under Hussein. That’s one of the metrics which I think would be considered objectively better now than it was, even with the current difficulties.
Houngan
3320
Yeah, but you included “Freedom!” which is about as nebulous as a topic can get. Outside of that, Costa Rica is the greatest country in the Americas, because they have all the other things beyond us. And pretty free, too! It’s just a bad framing of an idea, is the upshot.
One would have to ask Iraqis this question, not Americans. it makes zero difference what we think about the relative merits (or demerits) of Iraq pre, during, and post-Hussein. Only Iraqis can decide whether they would rather have endured Saddam’s evils or whether the US invasion and subsequent consequences was preferable.
Timex
3322
That’s the thing, back when we were in Iraq we heard about it all the time… But I haven’t seen anything about Iraq in the news in ages. So it’s really hard for me to know what things are currently like there.
Thrag
3323
Look, I think we can all argee that life might possibly be better for the people who survived the invasion, occupation, unspoken civil war and the religious fundamentalist insurgency that followed.
I mean you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Well, you don’t have to take wikipedia’s word for it. Here’s the US Gov’s current evaluation of the situation there:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/iraq-travel-advisory.html
Do not travel to Iraq due to terrorism, kidnapping, armed conflict, civil unrest, and Mission Iraq’s limited capacity to provide support to U.S. citizens.
U.S. citizens in Iraq face high risks to their safety and security, including the potential for violence and kidnapping. Terrorist and insurgent groups regularly attack Iraqi security forces and civilians. Anti-U.S. militias threaten U.S. citizens and international companies throughout Iraq. Attacks using improvised explosive devices, indirect fire, and unmanned aerial vehicles occur in many areas of the country, including Baghdad and other major cities.
If you decide to travel to Iraq:
- Draft a will and designate appropriate insurance beneficiaries and/or power of attorney.
- Discuss a plan with loved ones regarding care/custody of children, pets, property, belongings, non-liquid assets (collections, artwork, etc.), funeral wishes, etc.
- Share important documents, login information, and points of contact with loved ones so that they can manage your affairs if you are unable to return as planned to the United States.
This is what we got after spending 12 figures of US tax payer money in the country.
Despite that, you’re confident that it’s better than before the invasion, which was also a time when it was really hard for you to know what things were like.
Scott123
3327
I don’t like this post I wrote so will completely revise it. Sorry to those that read it and thought it was over the top.
I don’t think it’s fair to separate the long term benefit to group Y from the harm to group X, and the cost in lives and money spent. This would allow allow sorts of harms and bad decisions to be retroactively looked at positively.
20 years from now Ukraine is hopefully better off than three years ago, and might be more so than without the Russian invasion. It’s still a crime in progress, which I must say Biden and the US is doing a good job mitigating given the circumstances.
@RothdaTheTruculent great post.
Timex
3329
Oh, I wasn’t doubting the veracity of the statement, I was just saying that it’s odd because it’s measuring metrics which, if scored during Hussein’s regime, seemingly would have scored zero… The idea of press freedom at all under Hussein would be kind of laughable, right?
I wonder where press freedom falls in Maslow’s hierarchy?
I would agree with him that that Army ad is one of, if not the best, recruitment ad the Army ever aired.
I imagine thr Russian equivalent goes :Join Army now, or you and your mother might find out if you fit through window some night!"
God, I hated MILES training. The rifle emitters were heavy crap that constantly malfunctioned and the sensor rigs were uncomfortable.
I remember MILES gear in the 90s. Have they modernized it in any way? There’s no reason it shouldn’t be a lot smaller and lighter today. 1980s tech compared to 2010s tech is, well, we know how that goes.
No, it looks like they’re still using the same stuff.
It’s really simple. It was a good thing.
The alternative would be it was a disastrous course of action based on lies, that generated massive waste, suffering and death, all done to satisfy venal and selfish desires of those who fabricated the pretext.
And that could lead to a great deal of introspection and serious questioning of my support for it and the people who fabricated the pretext, both before and after.
So obviously it was a good thing.
Causality and correlation are two different things. We have two data points that are correlated: pre-war Iraq, and post-war Iraq. In between we have the war, but we also have a whole bunch of other stuff. We can safely say there is some connection between pre- and post-war Iraq, but we cannot with certainty say the one “caused” the other.
Less pedantically, this is a great case study in the limits of utilitarianism.
