You forgot Obama https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/18/commentary/w...

What's particularly disappointing is that Obama was elected after promising to end US military operations in the Middle East, and did much the opposite. Bush could at least be said to be doing what was expected of him, in continuing the legacy of his father.

Voters should really be holding their leaders to account the fiscal and moral costs of these wars, especially given their strategic objectives haven't been met. OTOH, one could argue it's kept a lot of people employed, and those people vote too.

> in continuing the legacy of his father.

And retaliating for the 9/11 attacks, of course.

It's possible to make this argument about Afghanistan, but Iraq was completely unrelated to 9/11.

there certainly was a connection, if not a logical one

There's a connection to the gulf war, but that's about it. The threat of WMDs was a concoction. And Iraq is Shia majority, whereas the Wahhabi jihadists and the Taliban, the incubator for the 9/11 terrorists, are supported by Sunni majority countries with completely different and consequential views on their religious texts. After Iraq was 'liberated' from Saddam, a Sunni leader, Iran, another Shia majority country, has been able to take political control of the country.

Well Obama like Trump is a celeb more than a leader. Celebs spend all day pandering to their fan clubs to survive. Leaders dont. And the US is celeb obsessed. So thats a big bug in the code.

You're getting downvoted, but it's true. Obama ushered in the age of the political personality cult. Pretty much every election from here on out is going to hinge on how well you can sell the politician's personality, and brushing aside his platform, all his shady connections and people he's aligned with. This is very much a byproduct of all the private money in election campaigning.

How's this different from Kennedy + Reagan?

I find it hard to square your statement with the election of Joe Biden, is he an outlier? I guess only time will tell.

Biden's political personality is not Trump.

I think that invalidates the theory a bit but the personality cult that got Biden elected was anti-Trump, not pro-Biden.

That article is grossly inaccurate. It's one thing to say "Obama applied hard power more than was expected" as opposed to "He was worse than Bush" which is completely unjustified. There is absolute no equivalence between drone usage and the two ground wars engaged by Bush. The 2 week Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq dropped more ordinance and killed more people than 8 years of drones. And the drone campaigns were mostly carried out with the private consent of the nations with targets. And saying the Libyan Civil War was "US-led" is just a complete lie. It was most directly lead by Libyans, but the air campaign was led by France.

I did say other associates.

US soldiers did not kill millions of people, Iraq is somewhere between 100000 and 650000 excess deaths to Oct 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas...

The criticisms in the Wikipedia are very detailed and imply there are problems with the 650000 figure of which 186000 are due to US troops direct actions. That still seems high, but you know being caught in the middle of a civil war is challenging.

Lancet indeed gives those numbers, other sources gives other numbers. Who's right? Probably we'll never know, but just for having the other numbers out there, here they are:

- Lancet survey (March 2003 – July 2006): 654,965 (95% CI: 392,979–942,636)

- Opinion Research Business (March 2003 – August 2007): 1,033,000 (95% CI: 946,258–1,120,000)

- Iraq Family Health Survey (March 2003 – July 2006): 151,000 (95% CI: 104,000–223,000)

- PLOS Medicine Study (March 2003 – June 2011): 405,000 (95% CI: 48,000–751,000)

Only Opinion Research Business[1] seems to put the upper bound above 1 million.

Rather than going for the "Lancet Surveys" page on Wikipedia, you'll probably get a better view when reading through the general page of "Casualties of the Iraq War" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Also, hestefisk (which you're replying to) are talking about Middle East, not just Iraq. US sure has killed a lot more people in Middle East than just the ones that died in Iraq.

> being caught in the middle of a civil war is challenging

Not sure we're talking about the same war here. As far as I know, the US invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq in recent times (so no civil war), pretty sure we're referring to those events (post 9/11), not the civil wars that were happening there before that.

"The criticisms in the Wikipedia are very detailed and imply there are problems with the 650000 figure of which 186000 are due to US troops direct actions. That still seems high, but you know being caught in the middle of a civil war is challenging."

I am not sure you can honestly characterize US as being caught in the middle of the war. US caused it. Everything that follows is its responsibility. That is why you don't start wars willy nilly.

> War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

from the judgement of the International Military Tribunal for Germany, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judnazi.asp#common

I recall Iraq being more of an invasion than a civil war.

It's complicated, because it started out as "smash the state and let democracy reassert itself". Everyone involved in the room had such a broken mental model of what the Iraqi population was like. American politicians have been getting drunk off the rhetoric of democracy for some time, and we typically forget that most governments are precariously balanced between multiple competing socioeconomic elements with eternal and unending grudges between one another. In the case of Iraq, what started as "invade and impose democracy" quickly progressed into policing sectarian violence as America inherited Saddam's problems.

> America inherited Saddam's problems

Sounds like not only the American politicians were drunk on something, what the hell are you talking about? In no way have the US been through the same pile of shit that Iraq has been through, and neither have any of those problems suddenly walked over the ocean home to the US. Sure, the US has their nose wet in Iraqi and Afghan blood, but let's not pretend and say that US takes any sort of responsibility for the bloodshed they've caused.

Otherwise I agree with your comment.

Iraq began as an invasion in March 2003. The invasion was exceedingly well planned and executed with minimal cost in a very short time frame, but the planning did not account for the resulting occupation that followed.

Key figures in Iraq, such as Ali Al Sistani, pressed US civilian authorities to stand up an interim government until a permanent government could be drafted. The interim government stood up in May 2004. But by that time Iraq had become a political vacuum with disastrous results. Various external political factions from terrorist groups and nation states were massively importing arms and radicalized youth to instigate internal tribal warfare and acts of terrorism.

Shortly after the interim government stood up GEN Casey took over command of coalition forces in Iraq and promoted a hand's off policy and letting the Iraqis clean up the mess, which further compounded the internal problems when Iraq really needed a strong occupation force to stabilize conditions until conditions allowed the capabilities for self governance. GEN Casey was replaced two years later in 2006.

In mid-2006 it really looked like Iraq was on the verge of civil war and the US completely reversed policy by late 2006 announcing a troop surge in 2007. The successful command policies of COL HR McMaster were given some credit for exemplifying a successful approach. GEN Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq and advocated a policy of counter-insurgency (COIN) that made significant advances at reducing internal violence and building trust in internal institutions. Over the next two years the surge declined to prior troop levels with forces more engaged in peace keeping and stability missions.

In 2009 coalition forces were drastically reduced in what was called a withdrawal. By that time Iraq was no longer on the verge of civil war. Conditions were improving and permanent government institutions were coming online. Unfortunately, the withdrawal was too early. Newly established Iraqi military forces were still conducting peace keeping and stability missions and had not matured enough yet to focus on national defense. This became apparent with the ISIS invasion of Mosul.

Hey, comments like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634382 break the site guidelines and are the sort of thing we end up banning accounts for. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? The idea is thoughtful, curious conversation, which is not exactly internet default as you know.

US literally started the damn civil war. And not in 2003... think '79.

The only thing that makes Amercians forget - lack of conscription and relatively small army(as % of population).

European colonial empires killed millions as well and faced no prosecution. Never forget what Hitler said; he said that concentration camps were not his idea instead he learnt about it from reading about British concentration camps during the Second Boer War in which thousands of Boers died.

And the inspiration for the gas chambers came from US border posts with Mexico, where anyone coming in from Mexico had to have their clothes fumigated with Zyklon-B and themselves bathed in gasoline (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=517617...).

There's a big difference between using chemicals to prevent disease from entering your country (However misguided) and using it as a tool for mass murder and genocide.

Not to mention there was Hitler's quote about how no-one remembers the Armenian genocide. He wasn't even wrong about that, as few remember the brutality that the Nazis exacted on the Poles.

The comparison is silly. While the Boer War concentration camps were brutal, they were nothing on par with the Nazis.

In fact “concentration camp” is largely a misnomer. The sizable majority of Holocaust victims were killed in extermination camps, like Treblinka. These never even purported to hold any prisoner population, and simply murdered all prisoners immediately upon arrival.

The British have no shortage of problems. But nothing in their history is even remotely comparable to Hitler.

I mean we did have a pretty brutal occupation of many other countries and were directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the process. We even had our own fair share of racist leaders - take a look at what Churchill had to say about Indian people for example. The timescales were different - Britain committed its crimes over the course of centuries rather than a decade or so - but it's not accurate to say "nothing in their history is even remotely comparable" to Nazi Germany.

The main visible difference nowadays is that Germans of today are hyper-aware of the atrocities committed in the past by their ancestors. Britons are often either ignorant of theirs or are proud of them.

There is no difference between starved Boer children[1] and starved Jewish children[2].

Warning: Disturbing images

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_Holocaust#/med...

Well, there is a slight difference between 26,000 and 7 million.

Murder is a murder and it is wrong in both views of the law and the god if you are religious.

And I absolutely agree with that. Earl Kitchener is an evil man. But he acted independently to convert humanitarian refugee camps into punitive concentration camps. The British government itself investigated the allegations, and explicitly put an end to Kitchener's abuses after they came to light. The opposition party and subsequent prime minister vehemently denounced his actions.

In contrast, Nazi leadership sat in a seaside resort and meticulously planned out the industrial mass execution of millions of people. The entire regime from Hitler down was involved. So while, I'd agree there's a moral equivalence between Kitchener and Heydrich, the Nazi regime itself is far more guilty than the British Empire.

I agree and it all comes down to power and monetary gain in both cases of Third Reich and British Empire. I didn't know that trigger for Second Boear War was the discovery of diamonds and gold in the Boer states. [1]

[1] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/boer-war-begins-...

You're right - Hitler was overt, while British still pretend that they are the "good guys" and literally blame the Irish for not joining them in WW2.

No wait! The British are worse, because majority have not accepted the horrors that British empire has brought to many people... Not the least being be Bengal Famine of 1943. There's no question that Nazis were evil. Time to realize that many other empires were/are "not benevolent".

That seems improbable given that German colonizers committed a genocide in Africa in the years following the Boer War.

whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

Not necessarily in this area. Wikileaks has exposed a number of US war crimes that went completely unpunished, while a person who was working on behalf of Wikileaks is being prosecuted on grounds that are fairly constructed and far-fetched even by US standards. Morally speaking, even if some of Assange's actions were immoral they might be considered excusable because the perils were outweighed by the benefits of these actions. It's not uncommon to reason that way. The same kind of reasoning is used to justify the means by the ends, e.g. purporters of the US drone strike program argue that the many civilian bystanders that are killed by those strikes are justifiable by the end, which is the extrajudicial killing of the alleged terrorist targets.

It's called a balance of consideration argument, sometimes also "conductive argument".

Obviously, the legal question is different from this, IANAL and I don't even know if lawyers use conductive arguments in this way. The judge in this extradition case certainly didn't, but that's not surprising since her job wasn't to judge Assange's actions.

Assange literally encouraged people to infiltrate US intelligence agencies and "leak" classified intel.

Let's not even get into his work laundering Russian hacked docs to damage the US, and then repeatedly lying about it.

He also is credibly accused of being a rapist.

The US has done some bad shit, no doubt, but that doesn't make Assange some saint. He's a bad dude.

CIA literally funded drug cartels. Obama literally authorized a drone strike on a "suspected terrorist US citizen" in Yemen.

While the rape accusation was retracted.

There's no equivalence of a proven fact vs accusation. Assange is unquestionably on a moral high ground here.

This is a straight-up lie. The accusations were never retracted. The women have maintained their allegations ever since.

and Not even going to respond to your whataboutism here, just lazy argumentation.

If I encourage people to leak Chinese classified documents, would that make me a bad dude too? I don’t think your reasoning is sound here.

If you raped two women, encouraged people to steal Chinese intel, and then worked with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda, yes, indeed you would be a bad dude.

Referencing the US war crimes that Assange helped expose is important though. I'm not denying Assange committed crimes by leaking or helping to leak secret documents, but it was the moral thing to do to expose war crimes that would otherwise be (and which are being) covered up.

In this case, the UK should not only consider the extradition request itself, but how they stand with regards to the US and their war crimes. And when it comes to war crimes, for the UK to be silent is to be complicit.

Calling out logical fallacies is a logical fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

It comes from not understanding the difference between logical entailment and logical equivalence when given a set of premises and a conclusion. I'd've hoped programmers would have taken enough discrete maths to know this.

> I'd've hoped programmers would have taken enough discrete maths to know this.

It’s not that I haven’t - but I’m 8 years out of uni and have completely forgotten how to apply Modus tollens and I suspect I’m not alone.

Being a hypocrite isn't a logical fallacy, but it isn't a good rhetorical stance for convincing others.

Its a deflection, not a fallacy.