If Iraq happened today I think more people would be upset and protest.

In 2001 I don't even think I had a cellphone, we didnt have social media like we do now, the only source of news was the News Paper and TV.

If it happened now we would be blastered on twitter with videos / photos of it happening in real time like we are know. Much more aware of war crimes happening.

We can't change what happened in the past but I would like to think we can change the future, and Iraq doesn't happen again.

(I was living in NZ at the time still at school when 9 11 happened)

I remember getting completely shut down by my American friends when I told them about atrocities committed by US soldiers and that Saddam had no nuclear weapons. It was like talking to a wall at the time. You don't understand - we are fighting this war for the world's safety, blah-blah.

Maybe the next US war will be different ? I doubt it. US propaganda makes Russian propaganda look like amateur hour. Stuff that doesn't fit the mainstream narrative will be shutdown hard, while stuff that fits it will be amplified continuously.

Yep, and EU is no better... they even banned RT... imagine banning CNN when USA attacked afghanistan.

But this is the start of the war, and there is A LOT of propaganda everywhere... everyone in the west is trying to show russia as losing everywhere, while they're conquering basically everything, on the other hand, they say that russians have destroyed whole cities, and only two short clips of the same building are showed, and now fearmongering like this reuters article.

I live in the balkans, and (obviously) I'm against any kind of war... but what putin is doing is no different than americans choosing a random middle eastern country (or even yugoslavia in 1999), and destroying the fuck out of it... but somehow it's different when americans do it.

At the time of the Iraq War I thought US mainstream media were nothing more than bloodthirsty warmongers, liars, and dogs of the state [1]. I still hold a grudge against them TWO DECADES later for the lies and war propaganda they spread during this time.

I mean I'm ultimately against banning media, I linked to RT a few days ago to make a point about the propaganda they spread, back at the time of the Iraq War I was a huge Jon Stewart fan and watched him every night just crap on that bad ol' media using clips from the media and you can't really do that effectively while banning that same media. However, I've got to say, I don't think banning American Media in the early Bush era would have been a preposterous idea. I mean at the end of the day the US media succeeded in selling that war to the "coalition of the willing". US war propaganda is probably more dangerous than Russian war propaganda because it's more sophisticated in the way it manufactures consent and has this veneer of journalistic freedom.

[1] A wiki article that summarizes popular criticisms of US media from this time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War

Eg.Yugoslavia's issues were internal.

Ps. A lot of people left RT because of it's propaganda and it's idiocracies even before the ban.

Yugoslavias issues were internal, until nato/usa started the bombings in 1999.

It doesn't matter that they left, the problem is the lack of free speech, because RT was the only medium that reported some things that most european newshouses avioided.

Obviously RT is displaying propaganda now, but so is everyone else, sadly.

Mail.ru is still an accessible propaganda site fyi.

> Maybe the next US war will be different?

Depends on if there's another incident akin to 9/11. Right now, if you tried to run the Iraq playbook again it would fail. But if something major happens which makes the US populace feel insecure, that could change.

I do think that there's a lesson in how difficult it would be to actually change the minds of Putin supporters in how slow the US reassessment of Iraq has been.

> US propaganda makes Russian propaganda look like amateur hour.

That's because US government narratives get continually sharpened and refined against the grindstone of challenges from the free press. This is different from countries where the government shuts down the press, such as Russia where the ridiculous canard that Ukraine needs to be "denazified" actually flies.

This. Dissidents would be cast as pro-Evil and purged from social media for misinformation.

Then we shouldn't accuse the average Russian citizen of not overthrowing their own government because while they do have cellphones today they live in a country with an extremely tight grip of media. If your argument holds for 2001 america, it's the same now for Russians.

How can we let more average Russian citizens have access to real facts? It's now a crime in Russia to publish 'lies" about the Russian army. It's hard. And it's even harder because any information you manage to smuggle through is always tainted by coming from the corrupt west.

Just thinking aloud: what if the information reaching Russians does not come from the west but from other countries, all other countries, the global south, the far east? They can't be all corrupted by the west, can they?

The US is the country of protests, there were plenty of protests against that war. I’ve been to a few myself.

Me to. I protested 2 times against the war in Irak. I was still in high school then and almost everyone was protesting.

Oh, it's good to know that. Maybe Russia could get away with the invasion without sanctions just letting his people protest against the war. No matter if the outcome of the war is the same, or if Putin is elected again (as happened with George W. Bush in the US).

Putin tried to run the GWB playbook with his invasion but he got impatient. He didn't have a 9/11 handed to him like GWB did. Putin's excuse is too flimsy about a Nazi genocide against Russians. There wouldn't be any sanctions whatsoever against Putin if he had planes flying into a building in Moscow.

Putin is playing the kosovo card.

An area with a minority, self declared independence, minority and majority fighting every now and then, and then the "outside player" deciding to attack the whole country to "protect the minority".

For us in the balkans, america has always been a bigger threat to peace (and still is), especially after having plane fly above our roofs to bomb a country 200miles away, and not that long ago, we were still a same country.

His mistake is to mix up these plays. If he had stuck to that balkans play it would all be a lot harder to argue with from a western perspective. We just don’t know enough t about Eastern European politics/beefs. But he’s also talked about Russian security and nato expansion and denazification which is so stupid as to make a mockery of any sensible rationale.

Sanctions against the US for the Iraq war would have been totally legitimate. What exactly is your point?

That the US is arguably the most powerful nation in the world and that sanctions by smaller economies vs empires like the US are like Palistinian children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks.

It is easy to claim that sanctions against the US would have been legitimate when it is clear to most that they would have had little to no meaningful impact.

This was true during the first iraq war... and even then barely.

Now, just china imposing sanctions, would seriously fuck with US economy. Add on EU to that, and the situation would be pretty bad for americans.

The point is that there were no sanctions, and there won't be the next time the US decides to invade another country. So punishing Russia this time gives the US an unfair advantage, and that's not good for anyone outside the US.

It's more than that. There are other impact:

* There are a lot of Indians openly support Putin. I guess there is an excuse to justify the invasion because Russia is not the first one doing that.

* Inside China there are a lot of debate. Russians invasion obviously breaks the international law. But if US did the same thing in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria ...(Let's not debate if US conducted good invasion to avoid to going to rabbit hole), also indirectly caused humanity disaster and refugees, why put Russia in a different standard?

Not making judgement of which is correct or wrong, just saying it's difficult to convince certain population if different standards were applied.

India has a similarly authoritarian nationalist govt and looks a lot like Russia 20 years ago. I am very nervous about the direction India is heading.

What sanctions against the American economy following Iraq war, would have pushed Americans to revolt?

We had big protests. They were not big enough unfortunately.

There were plenty of protests - I remember seeing one walk by (including most of the faculty) in my university cafeteria at the time.

Then you didn't look very hard.

I remember massive protests in Europe at least. --Largest ever-- anti-war rally that go straight to the Guinness book of records.

Apart of breaking a new world record in number of people participating, they were a total lose of time.

All the opposition to a regime gathering together in a street, so can be conveniently netted and arrested like a school of fishes, is just making the life much easier for dictatorships

While the protests to a large extent took place outside of America, the Feb 15, 2003 protest against the Iraq War was the largest protest ever at the time. The protests were certainly more enthusiastic and open than what we see in Russia, you can speculate on the reasons why.

> Didn't see any revolting Americans when the Iraq War was initiated.

Evidently you didn't want to see.

was Iraq a pacifist country? BTW Ukraine is invaded since 2014, so the War is happening since 2014. Putin just brought it to a larger scale after to believe that EU and USA were weaker after pandemics and Afghanistan.

Americans revolting no, but I'm sure the Iraqis would have something to say about revolting Americans. ;-)