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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Do you think Cheney's war was significantly more justified than Putin's war?

People who start wars are legitimately bad, but let's not pretend that Russia is special here .

America would be a better place if it had more people furious that America is turning into Russia, and fewer people trying to justify that it's not quite as bad.

I think the problem is that a lot of people in America want America to be more like Russia.

Yes. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst leaders in history and the neocons legitimately thought they could create a free market utopia in Iraq (lmao), check out Imperial Life in the Emerald City. They fucked up horribly and made Iraq worse because they were incompetent morons who fired the entire army and didn't bother to make sure people actually had basic services. Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire and is going to war in Ukraine for that reason, per his speech on February 22nd before the war.

It's like the difference between a drunk driver who runs over 12 kids and a school shooter. Both are bad but one is worse

Funny, that sounds like the Ukrainian public’s opinion about Zelenskyy before the war started. Dismal leader with rock bottom approval ratings and high levels of corruption. Still, that definitely doesn’t justify foreign invasion.

One was an electorate in a democratic country being disillusioned about a leader they freely elected. The other is and a genocidal dictator who murdered the previous dictatorial leadership to get to power, gassed civilians and launched wars of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands. Not sure how those two "sound alike" to you. Care to elaborate?

So Iraq was a war done out of charity?

It was a war done because Cheney and Rumsfeld hated Hussein and justified it with bullshit aspirational nonsense that didn't work. It was out of charity in the same way communist revolutions are, and in practice it was an atrocity.

Instantly to the 'what about' deflection.

“Whataboutism” is only a thing if the comparison is in bad faith (i.e. irrelevance or significantly different scales of atrocity).

Directly comparing one unjustified, illegal and unjust war (Iraq) with another one (Ukraine) isn’t whataboutism, it’s a legitimate criticism of hypocrisy.

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