btw, I was and remain anti-Iraq war but your equivocation is clearly wrong.
Do you really think you were the first person to come up with the idea of assassinating a head of state as a means to end a war? It doesn't really work that way.
It wasn't 1M, it was about 1/5 of that. I'm not of course justifying the loss of life, however it behooves us to speak precisely instead of hyperbolically. [1]
> I did hear a rumor that it was all about the oil anyway LoLz.
That rumor makes no sense if you actually dig in. 72% of America's foreign oil imports come from Canada and Mexico. Only about 3% from Iraq. And Iraq was exporting oil before the war, too. [2] 2T was spent in the Middle East. That buys you a heck of a lot of market-rate oil.
[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
Oil is sold at a global price. The US has an incentive to keeping prices low so Americans have cheap gas. Plus it strips away power from oil financed nations which is in the US interest.
> If you dig in a little more you realize control of the oil and contracts went to US and British firms after the war where previously other nations had those contracts.
And that return is pennies on the dollar compared to the two trillion spent on the war. $2T buys you a whole whack of oil you can subsidize for your people.
The economic arguments just don't hold up.
The 2T doesn't disappear it goes into jobs and new technology. Those oil contracts employ many in the US.
More important is the US gains control.
Yeh? Source pls.
> So what if it was based on a lie?
Jeez, it's that easy for you to say that eh. Say that to a person who lost his family in that invasion.
You could make the argument that the world could have stood up and sanctioned the US - but likely they did not because they probably agreed with the action, whether they could say so directly or not. 'Should' is not the bar. The fact it took a lie to convince folks to go in is neither here nor there, IMO. Again, I was against the war.
> Jeez, it's that easy for you to say that eh. Say that to a person who lost his family in that invasion.
Say that to someone in Kurdistan who suffered life-long debilitating injuries due to the sarin and VX gas attacks that were then followed by a Napalm run. [1] Saddam launched some of the worst chemical attacks in history against his own citizens. We can go back and forth on this all day.
It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. (…) The aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our chopper. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl's mouth and she died in my arms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre#Chemical_atta...
We supported him when he did that. And during the 90s, we instituted sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. That's 100 children for every single person who died in Halabja. If the question is would you rather be a modern country ruled by the iron will of a belligerent despot, or bombed into medieval times with every cultural institution shattered and orders of magnitude more body count than your dictator ever generated, spawning ISIS...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/10/are-1-million-ch...
And that's irrelevant to whether taking him down was a good decision. Either before or after. Once again, I didn't support the war at the time, and I think the casualties are horrifying. However, it's not even close to the same thing.
> And during the 90s, we instituted sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. That's 100 children for every single person who died in Halabja.
You don't really weigh moral wars this way. For instance, the Nazis killed 6 million in the concentration camps. However, an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished in World War 2, or about 3% of the 1940 world population. However, nobody frames World War 2 as "costing 10 lives for everyone who died in the camps" and therefore a bad idea.
Your framework allows for invasions over fake WMDs and fake Nazis alike. Russia didn't sanction the US over Iraq, in the spirit of peace and cooperation between nuclear states the US could afford them the same courtesy.
If you can justify Iraq you can justify Ukraine. Personally I don't agree with invasions anywhere for any reason not do I believe in the concept of "world police". That's just forcing one people's will upon another and denying them the right to destroy their own tyrants and seize their own destiny.
Absolutely, unequivocally not.
My framework does no such thing.
Also it's pretty apparent that you view a white life is greater than a brown life and you view invading middle eastern countries as something that's okay and are going to justify no matter what, so there really is no point in this discussion.
Re: your source, go do some more digging, it was the CIA that helped Saddam deploy those chemical weapons.
You have no idea what my positions are, and you're doing a bunch of wild finger pointing.
US invasion: For Democracy, Freedom and Kumbaya!, Millions died for the Greater Good. (hugs & kisses)