The main reason that propaganda and dehumanization are such a typical part of war, is that it helps prevent people from considering the weight of their own actions, let alone the perspective of the enemy. What I described is not a whataboutism, it's a hypothetical illustrating exactly what's happening today, except flipping the roles of the participants. Yet of course it feels alien enough that you instinctively want to fight against it - I must be tricking you or engaging in some sort of deceptive rhetorical device. I am not.

All I see is you parroting Russian propaganda, sorry. The whataboutism comes in when you pick the US-led invasion of Iraq over non-existing WMDs, which of course was also unjustified. But one invasion being unjustified doesn't suddenly justify another (it only does in Soviet and Russian propaganda logic) - also note that the western countries were extremely divided over the Iraq invasion (e.g. France, Germany, Canada and the Scandinavian countries couldn't be arsed to join), while there's pretty much universal agreement in the so-called 'collective West' that supporting Ukraine with weapons and training to defend themselves is the morally right thing to do.

Careful, many people on HN (as smart as they are) have little tolerance for nuance and empathy.

And they like to respond with “whataboutism!” - which is ironically, a Soviet propaganda term.

Americans are particularly myopic and view the world though a post-history lens.

Whataboutism is an old Soviet propaganda technique, but AFAIK they didn't come up with the term (they must have had an internal name for it of course, but somehow I doubt they called it whataboutism)