Ukraine and Iraq

The almost universal horror and revulsion – China, India, Fox News, and the more openly fascistic parts of the Republican party excepted – that has greeted the Russian invasion of Ukraine suggests an awkward comparison with the American invasion of Iraq 19 years ago this week.

Obviously there are some significant differences between the two invasions.  Iraq was a one-party dictatorship while Ukraine is a liberal(ish) democracy.  On the whole, the U.S. military did not target, terrorize, and murder civilian Iraqis in the same way that the Russian military has clearly targeted, terrorized, and murdered civilian Ukrainians.  In the abstract at least, replacing a brutal dictator with a hypothesized liberal democracy would be a desirable thing, leaving aside for the moment the reckless absurdity of attempting such a transformation via a military invasion.

And, unlike Vladimir Putin, the Bush administration went to great lengths to conjure up a legal rationale – Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction, and the regime’s intent to use them against the USA – in order to characterize the invasion of Iraq as something other than what it so obviously in retrospect was, i.e., an aggressive war launched for the purpose of replacing a regime the administration wanted to destroy with one that would be friendlier to US interests.

Those are all important differences.  But ultimately they’re not that important.  The essential similarity between the two invasions remains far more fundamental: in each case, a military power invaded another country because its government decided that war was an appropriate method for replacing the other country’s government with a regime that the invading country would prefer to the status quo.

In the USA, this is an awkward comparison because the vast majority of the people who enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq now have no difficulty recognizing what an atrocious crime the invasion of Ukraine really is. 

I haven’t seen much if any acknowledgement of this awkwardness among our political and media elites.  This might be considered surprising, given the obvious analogies between the two invasions.  Now there are some equally obvious explanations for that fact:

• People don’t like to contemplate their mistakes, especially when their mistakes involved enabling what in retrospect were flagrant war crimes.
• The war fever that gripped the USA in the wake of 9/11 still somehow retains some bizarre psychological justification for the invasion of Iraq in the minds of many erstwhile supporters of that invasion, even though every semi-rational person will admit – again in retrospect – that this justification was always transparently bogus.
• American exceptionalism was and remains a hell of a drug.  We can’t really be like Vladimir Putin – a legitimately Hitler-like figure in various important ways – because unlike him our intentions were so good, even if they were (retrospect again!) just a bit on the utopian and unrealistic side.
• Exceptionally stupid and/or dishonest people still cling to the nonsensical argument that the WMD rationale for the invasion was legitimate, only the Bush administration was misled by “bad intelligence.”   This argument requires continuing to overlook that the WMD rationale would have remained just as bogus even if the purported intelligence had been accurate, as the idea that Iraq posed some sort of military threat to the US was always preposterous.

Thus, many people perfectly capable of recognizing the massive war crimes the Russians are committing in Ukraine today remain totally blind to the nature of the essentially similar war crimes the USA began to commit in Iraq 19 years.  This is, ultimately, a testimony to overwhelming psychological distortions produced by war fever, and its close cousin, militaristic nationalism.

That almost none of these people seem to have noticed this isn’t surprising.  Still, it might be worth recalling the next time our powers that be decide they want to tell an unfriendly regime, in the inimitable words of both the cinematic psychopath Travis Bickle, and the eminently respectable New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, to suck on this.