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Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see a similar comparison between the Russian state media and the treatment of the Iraq war by US media in the first years.

Almost all Russian propaganda staples have direct correspondents:

- Denazification and demilitarization -> ending Saddam's support for terrorism and Al Qaeda

- Biological and nuclear dirty weapons -> Weapons of mass destruction

- Saving the people of Donbas -> Human rights abuses by the Saddam Regime, Iraqi freedom

- Special operation -> Military action (but in very short order, US media started calling it an invasion)

I'm not saying the situations are similar, they are clearly not, but the strong similarity speaks volumes about the constraints under which wartime propaganda operates. The US media, retaining its freedom, eventually recovered on the issue of WMDs and other biased points of view, the Russians will probably not.

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Number one difference is that US forces didn’t focus on killing random civilians instead of military.

This is just revisionism. The US had better optics and narratives, but they sure did not shy of destroying urban areas to save their soldiers. Just look at fallujah.

Again - the difference is that Russians are doing this instead of fighting the Ukrainian army, as opposed to a collateral damage. What US has done was a crime, but Russian actions are even worse.

And most of all: what has happened, it happened. What matters is what’s happening right now, because we can still change it.

The ukrainian army is in the cities too though, it's collateral damage. If their objective was just to terrorize or genocide the ukrainians they would not restrict themselves to bombing cities that are currently part of the front.

I agree to some extent on the last part, right now is more important but it does not mean we have to whitewash the past. I didn't bring up the US, but even the current events do not justify historical revisionism. You can denounce what's happening now without saying it's worse than what our side did before.

Russians _are_ bombing cities that are not part of the front. That's the point: they are fighting civilians instead of army, not in addition to.

That's a nonsense claim. If Russians would see human and civil destruction as a military goal, we wouldn't have thousands of victims, but hundreds of thousands. We would have bombing campaigns like the second world war, a single bomb dropped on a communist apartment block would kill hundreds.

There is intense research and analysis by credible western sources that the Russian impasse is caused by exactly the fact they ran out of smart and precision weaponry, while the Ukrainian have took positions in the cities. This forces the Russians to an all out, total war of annihilation that is bad for them from a propaganda standpoint, both externally, pushing their allies away, and internally, since most Russians consider the Ukrainians as a brethren people.

It's absurd to claim that the Russians are "focusing" on killing civilians. They seem strongly aware of the propaganda potential of civilian deaths, and they are frustrated to be drawn into urban warfare instead of the easy victory they envisioned out in the agricultural fields.

To put it in perspective, the civilian deaths resulting from the Iraq war are in the hundreds of thousands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Don't try to stick to facts here! The "intellectual curiosity" driven discussion on HN demands complete surrender to the current submission mood, which is "Russia bad". I'm surprised that your comment isn't flagged yet.

Well, Russia is bad, there is no denying that. I might go as far as to say "US good", in a black and white picture of the world suitable for 6 year olds. But the world is not black and white, it's all shades of browns.

It’s not “Russia bad”, it’s “Russia invaded a country for political reasons and is committing multiple war crimes on purpose”.

Russians don’t care about propaganda potential - their army is a joke, so they are targeting civilians as a terror tactics.

But hey, I appreciate that you created an account just to whitewash Rashists.

We have found our deep thicker and geopolitical strategist.

Amazingly, they conjure their deep insights without any factual information, using only their extraordinary prowess for bellybutton scratching.

...said pro-russian shill account created 30 days ago :-D

That's rich. Here is an idea: if you are looking for a face to hate, for example that of a dumb Russian who is fed only propaganda, has no ability to separate truth from manipulation, no ability to see nuances and that would make excelent cannon fodder in Putin's personal war, than you should look in a freaking mirror. Don't worry, your Putin will come to you.

what do you know about it, either the war in iraq or the war in ukraine?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre

oh, doea that not count because they were contractors?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...

surely these are isolated incidents.

Remember the last missile sent in anger in Kabul, August 2021?

Random civilians there, as many other American attacks were (are).

Try searching for some objectives data, e.g.:

* Estimated Iraqi civilian fatalities: from 3k to 7k in 1 month, 1 week and 4 days [1]

* Estimated Ukrainian civilian fatalities: from 1k (according to UN) to 4k (according to Ukraine) in 1 month [2]

In short, Western news are unsurprisingly biased towards the Western perspective.

Edit: note also that Ukraine has a larger populations than Iraq, so I'd expect more civilian casualties in Ukraine than in Iraq, but actually there are less.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...

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