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Comment by hereforphone | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

If the US government made the argument that they should invade on the basis of human rights violations, we would be living in a very different world.

I agree. I think my point is not that we should invade for humanitarian reasons, but that I don't feel too bad about the Iraq invasion, given what I've seen.

Obvious Chat GPT is obvious.

It might have been flagged because it's unnecessarily verbose and reads like it was generated by GPT.

1. al-Qaeda leadership fled Afghanistan for Pakistan before the US invasion, and the US knew it but invaded Afghanistan anyway.

2. Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons were well known to America, because American intelligence helped him acquire and target those chemical weapons against Iran in the Iraq-Iran War. Even going so far as to provide him with satellite intelligence for this purpose.

3. The "WMDs" used to justify the invasion of Iraq to the public were not chemical gasses. The US government claimed Iraq had a nuclear weapons program in advanced stages of development. This was never true and they knew it.

There are truths on both sides of the argument IMO. It's not black and white. But it's hard to seriously consider the opinions of those who haven't participated in it in any way (government, contractor, military...) and may not even have been born when these things kicked off. Media is a very biased filter.

Also the same day that the UN was presenting evidence of chemical weapons having been used by Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld was flying there to reassure Saddam Hussein about the US oil pipeline project in Iraq.

I think that the chemical weapons might have been used as an excuse for the first Gulf war by George H.W. Bush, 6 years later ??

As with anything complex there will be a lot of reasons. I think Saddams decision to sell oil denominated in Euros was probably influential. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur...

Primarily though I think the US govt at the time genuinely thought they could do regime change and create stable democracies in both Afghanistan and Iraq. They doubtless had many murky reasons for wanting to believe they could do this, but I think the belief that they _could_ do it was sincere if proven false by events.

Stop responding to chatGPT pastes. That’s probably why it was deleted.

When asking ChatGPT to write comments, consider using the SmartGPT approach and break up the task into two prompts. The first prompt should generate options to be evaluated by the second prompt.

Prompt #1 "Let's write a comment for Hacker News. The title of the article is {XXX}. You didn't click on the link, so you don't know what the article is actually about. The current top comment is {YYY} by user {bar} with karma {83939}. I want you to write a comment in response to {ZZZ} by user {foo} with karma {9001}. Keep your comment in a single long paragraph and use jargon. Write two comments one supporting user {foo} and one as a rebuttal."

Prompt #2 "You are a resolver tasked with picking which of two comments will earn the most karma on Hacker News. The first comment is in support of the comment {ZZZ} by user {foo} with karma {9001}. The second comment is a rebuttal. Pick one and explain step-by-step why you believe the comment would receive more karma than the alternative."

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