←back to thread

93 points nabla9 | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
melling ◴[] No.44088874[source]
$2 trillion for that war. Next time let’s cure cancer(s).

Correct, no one said it would be easy. True we would likely not have succeeded, but millions more would be cancer survivors.

replies(6): >>44088989 #>>44089127 #>>44089182 #>>44089184 #>>44094439 #>>44095588 #
motorest ◴[] No.44088989[source]
> $2 trillion for that war. Next time let’s cure cancer(s).

Aren't there any positive tradeoffs in overthrowing the likes of Saddam Hussein?

replies(8): >>44089023 #>>44089046 #>>44089083 #>>44089101 #>>44089188 #>>44089238 #>>44089291 #>>44089319 #
impossiblefork ◴[] No.44089083[source]
The problem was that he was holding Iraq together. After he fell, we ended up with a situation where there are about 1/2 as many Iraqi Christians in Sweden as there are in Iraq.

Basically, Iraq went straight to hell, and whatever minorities etc. didn't flee got murdered.

I interpret it as something along the lines of Saddam Hussein's government caring about having a strong or at least functional country enough that they only wanted to kill Kurds and Iranians.

Baathists are better than sectarian madmen, and I suspect we'll see some kind of idiot outcome in Syria as well.

replies(1): >>44089244 #
1. motorest ◴[] No.44089244[source]
> The problem was that he was holding Iraq together.

Not really. He was oppressing Iraq and ruling it with a cruel tight grip, but any regime change takes decades to normalize. You don't just replace a nation's political class overnight and expect to a) not have pushback, b) the successors having it easy or hitting the ground running.

replies(3): >>44089281 #>>44089285 #>>44089877 #
2. throwanem ◴[] No.44089281[source]
> any regime change takes decades to normalize

Oh come on. To whom in 2025 could you possibly expect to sell this nonsense excuse for an unbroken record of catastrophic neoconservative failure? Do you steal candy from babies also?

3. impossiblefork ◴[] No.44089285[source]
I think the outcome was bad enough that the cruel crip didn't matter, and I suspect that we'll find that to have been the case also in Syria.

Furthermore, it's not as if though cruel grips can't grow back with another hand.

4. brookst ◴[] No.44089877[source]
You’re saying that he was holding Iraq together in a bad way, which is true.

But he was holding it together. There might be a case for removing him, but note that nobody ever made that case without resting it on total fabrications. Because, while he was “bad” in a moral sense, there was no case for the war that could be made using the actual truth.