I think a material difference between Iraq (v2 anyway) and Ukraine is that they can keep doing the “well Russia was the aggressor” thing indefinitely even if the reality is more complicated.
also yes obviously some libs are still stubborn about Iraq, the worst ones, but for the most part its generally agreed that the Iraq War was a bad thing.
In ten years every liberal who was frothing about russian orcs will confidently tell you they always said the neo-nazi problem in Ukraine was bigger than the invasion, and that they correctly predicted all these terror attacks all over Europe, and they’re definitely anti-fascists from way back.
They don’t care about the Kurds is Syria after having been told they were out bestest friends in the middle east, I think they’ll completely abandon it
Kurds aren’t “aryan” though. You’re missing the racism from your analysis.
Key difference: there’s no US boots on the ground in Ukraine. Like with Vietnam, a lot of the Iraq rhetoric is centered on the american soldiers who were killed and maimed. Notice how US/NATO intervention in Libya and Kosovo, which was accomplished primarily through air power and without significant losses, has not had any critical reexamination—I would think the lack of american corpses has a good deal to do with that
disclaimer: this is not financial advice, i am just a small worm
At first I thought that this was the one comment here I agreed with the most, and I might still think that, but the difference is that Libya/Kosovo were “over” much faster than Ukraine. The boogeymen were quickly taken out, while Russia just refuses to collapse, at least so far.
In my extremely limited experience, outside of the internet, libs don’t really care about Ukraine anymore and won’t push back if you criticize Biden giving tens of billions of dollars to Nazis. This in itself may be kind of a re-examination on their part? They also feel the same way about covid, though. It just doesn’t matter at all to them, even though it’s actually still extremely important (as is Ukraine). I do have to kind of wonder what they care about at the moment? They were so happy when Biden won the election, but I think most of us strongly suspected that this was going to be as good as it got for them for quite some time. Who knows, it might even be their last major victory.
Like with Vietnam, a lot of the Iraq rhetoric is centered on the american soldiers who were killed and maimed.
Even when they oppose war, it’s backed by nationalist reasons.
There’s definitely US boots on the ground, just like there are in Syria, Yemen, Kenya, Pakistan and all the other nations we don’t officially invade. There are literally US soldiers, spec ops and bases and officers stationed there coordinating raids, launching drones, doing spec ops.
Americans think there is this hard solid line between invasion with boots and other activities, but in reality there’s no discrete border it just slowly becomes a full invasion
Advisors and intelligence guys are not the same as the US occupying in force.
It’s a gradient and blurred line that further blurs over time as “intelligence guys” start doing special operations and assassinations of political and military targets, and the “advisors” are launching recon drones and coordinating the Ukrainian military. Oh, not to mention all the “recently retired” military “mercenaries” driving the tanks.
Eventually US soldiers do occupy held positions as well, as seen in Syria where there are thousands of literal US troops occupying the country yet almost every American would say we never invaded Syria if you ask them. Huh weird, if you never invaded how did thousands of your troops set up bases in a nation you were not invited into? If you never invaded, why are you launching cruise missiles and drone strikes into Syrian territory? This American fiction about “boots on the ground” is a Liberal delusion to assuage the cognitive dissonance they have about being a bloodthirsty world-conquering military empire.
Then after the fact, if Liberals ever acknowledge their complicity in an invasion, it’s framed as “the US got pulled, unwilling, into a quagmire” as if that wasn’t the full intention the entire time and they didn’t get pulled but were pushed in by the US government and MIC - first as advisors, then as intel guys, then as mercenaries, then the drone strikes as “anti-terrorism” operations, then as “peace-keepers” in a coalition force. It’s a smooth gradient, there is no wall.
I and a lot of others protested the Iraq invasion before it took place, and predicted the somewhat obvious quagmire that resulted. I would have protested the Russian invasion as well if I were a Russian citizen and if it would have been safe enough to do so (Putin’s dictatorship makes that purely hypothetical though).
I think we may disagree on the origins of the Maidan Protests, the Crimea annexation, and at this point probably even the end of WW2 and Soviet Union.
Edit: aw shit, I just realized where I am.
If I were Russian I would have volunteered to fight with the DPR in 2014 and would be posting Z and helping destroy AmeriKKKa
when they have a collective realization it usually comes long after it stops mattering (like denouncing the coup in Chile that happened 50 years ago)
The collective realization happened with Iraq before the war was over at least. But yeah there’s a lot of differences that mean that I dont think thatll happen here.
I feel like that realization had more to do with the part where it just kept going even after the whole overthrowing Saddam bit by a lot. Especially after all the reasons given for going in were one by one shown to be wrong from the jump. Even with all that, I think the libs were more embarrassed about how much money was used in “nation building” while the US economy tanked. And not so much for the reasons that we constantly hear from them about “cost of human lives” or whatever pretend moral shit. I think most of them would still resort to adding something to the effect of “well even if we were lied to, it was still worth getting rid of Saddam” after front loading how they were lied to.
So this time the big “gotcha” bit of smugness will still be about how “evil Russia has always been”. So it will be still considered America helping “protect freedom” is the “correct” and “moral” choice (even with the price tag that would never be treated as “sooo important” for helping poor US citizens at home). Hell, they still like to call the FSB the KGB. So real “lessons” will not matter outside the same talk but no actions shit they do every single time. They did all kinds of talking nice words for BLM protests (not the org), but their actions were to paint anyone that wasn’t “correctly protesting” as bad and over-funded the pigs more. And the cycle continues.
“well even if we were lied to, it was still worth getting rid of Saddam”
I dont hear this very often from libs. Usually they say getting into Iraq at all was a bad idea altogether. But thats just my experience.
I really think a lot of that realization is due to the financial collapse of 2007-08 where a shit ton of people started pointing out how horrible the USA is.
Sadly that all seemed to die down when Obama hired that ferry guy to male him some low effort campaign posters that everyone wet their pants over.
It’ll be like conservatives with Vietnam: a stab in the back narrative (albeit less visceral due to it being a proxy war.)
I think that they will continue to do the “russia was the aggressor” but they’ll almost certainly start saying “we should have negotiated sooner, it was obvious we had bad intelligence (or, if we’re lucky, ‘it was obvious the media was lying’) about how weak the russian army/economy was”
