Hacker News Reader

Comment by imwillofficial | Hacker News Reader

In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the verifiable artifact was the destruction of the twin towers. The rest was accusation and conjecture, which was quite flimsy.

The current situation is quite different. There is plenty of verified evidence that Russia is attacking Ukraine. No reasonable voices are disputing the situation, and we have direct, primary, difficult to fake evidence confirming that this is what has happened.

I would say that this feels more like Kuwait than the so-called war on terror, having lived through all three (although I was quite young during Kuwait.

Afghanistan unlike Iraq was pretty clear though. Bin laden was hiding there and the Taliban were refusing to give him up also Afghanistan was in a state of permanent civil war and the Taliban government was not recognized internationally . So US wasn’t exactly invading a sovereign country (unlike what happened with Kuwait, Iraq II and the Ukraine).

It is clear that afghanistan was a problem in this situation, but it's not clear that going to war was a good or justified solution to the problem. Just my 2c.

Not sure you could call Iraqi-occupied Kuwait a sovereign country.

I think the parent comment was saying that Iraq was invading a sovereign country in the Gulf War. I can see how the comment could be parsed as saying America invaded the sovereign country of Kuwait, but given the third example is Ukraine I think the parent was just giving 3 examples of invasions of sovereign countries in general and not just invasions by the US.

Kuwait may be a far better comparison.

Even as a child I still remember the “bayoneting babies” story being tearfully told to congress by some nurse.

All lies of course.

Propaganda is a constant, whether a war is justified or not. The bayoneting babies thing was a lie. But the overall injustice of the invasion is widely agreed. You have a look through the propaganda to get at the truth.

The same goes for the current situation. The ghost of kyiv or snake island are examples of propaganda that should be ignored. But they don't change the fact that Russia is prosecuting and illegal and unjust war against a sovereign nation.

'Fog of war', 'Truth is the first casualty of war'... it typically takes quite a long time for the truth to emerge about what actually occurred but 'A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on' - or in the case of Twitter be overwhelmingly promoted as 'the truth' with surrounding arguments and accusations hanging off that 'truth' within hours.

The latest fiasco with Democrat Tulsi Gabbard pointing out labs should not be operating with dangerous pathogens in a hot war zone being mangled by Republican Mitt Romney as 'treason' is a current example - a misinformed online audience react furiously to something that was never said.

> But the overall injustice of the invasion is widely agreed.

It's not. Unless you define "widely" to be "amongst the people who used the invasion of Kuwait to justify the invasion of Iraq."

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-th...

https://billmoyers.com/2014/06/27/the-first-iraq-war-was-als...

From your second article:

"Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was 'worth fighting.'"

"Most countries condemned Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait."

That seems to support my assertion that it is widely agreed that Iraq's invasion was unjust, right? I'm not saying that literally everyone agrees it was unjust. Only that most folks do.

> some nurse.

Diplomat's daughter pretending to be a nurse.

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

produced by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill%2BKnowlton_Strategies

Oh even better

I've been watching Oliver Stone's film 'Ukraine on Fire', fascinating historical background to why this diplomatic disaster and ensuing latest hot war started in an area that's been smoldering and erupting for the last 100 years.

If you liked it you might also find the French documentary from Paul Moreira interesting. There's some overlap, but this one focuses on the events of Odessa more.

> "Ukraine The Masks of the Revolution", a documentary about role of extreme right-wing paramilitary groups in Ukraine during and after the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, and especially in the violence in Odessa in May 2014.

thanks, will watch!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com