Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-anniversary-.html

by enitihas • 8 years ago

69 29 8 years ago

ikeboy2• 8 years ago

I left Iraq a few months after the 1991 Gulf War and went to graduate school in the United States, where I’ve been ever since.

Love the ambiguity here.

z_open• 8 years ago

There's no ambiguity though.

ikeboy2• 8 years ago

On my first read I interpreted it as they'd been stuck in grad school for almost 3 decades, which seemed almost believable.

It's one of those context dependant sentences - if it had said since 2016, then that interpretation would be most likely correct.

gravis7777• 8 years ago

Wonder if this guy will also apologize for the horrible things Iraq did to both Iran in the early 80s and Kuwait in the 90s.

e40• 8 years ago

Whataboutism.

macintux• 8 years ago

Who needs to apologize more for that: the man who opposed Saddam or the U.S. government that encouraged his atrocities against Iran?

MrLeap• 8 years ago

I didn't read any apology in this essay.

Going to jump out on a limb and assume you're an American like me, if I'm wrong change the metaphors. What if another country killed a million of our countrymen. 20 years from now, would you have to apologize for the actions of the CIA, or the worst actions of all our leaders in the prior 40 years? Would you have to apologize for that before, during or after any reminiscences about the destruction of your country?

jmkb3• 8 years ago

It's a little odd to hold a civilian citizen of a despotic regime accountable for his government's actions.

bogomipz4• 8 years ago

And similarly it's a little odd to hold an entire country of 350 million people responsible for the self serving decisions made by a small cabal of powerful oil people(Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.)

Similarly was the entire country of Iraq responsible for horrific transgressions against the Kurds, Iran and Kuwait or just a small cabal of corrupt people with real power?

greatamerican• 8 years ago

So is the United States this man's country, or is Iraq this man's country?

aaomidi2• 8 years ago

Why not both?

24gttghh• 8 years ago

That war destroyed both countries. The credibility and finances, and the lives of thousands of soldiers in one, and the deaths of many hundreds of thousands and the societal fabric of another. Please take your tu quoque/no true scotsman fallacy somewhere else.

dnc• 8 years ago

Neither most likely. I think that this man is an apatrid and that he doesn't have a real home judging by a similar string of events in my life. My country was economically devastated due to unfavorable Geo-political circumstances and I eventually had to choose to move, rather than to prolong meaningless suffering. I was lucky to have a choice. Although, I'd say it was not as dramatic as in the case of Iraq. Anyhow, I feel as if I don't belong anywhere.

aaomidi2• 8 years ago

Content such as this really doesn't belong on this forum. It redditifes this forum for conversation.

I've also noticed people jump to attacking each other quite a lot more in the comments of pieces like this.

jfaucett2• 8 years ago

agreed. Still, I think of myself as an optimist and would like to think we HNers could civilly discuss any topic that popped up on HN :)

jdlyga• 8 years ago

American here. Never supported sending troops over there. Not a lot of people did. But Bush did it anyway. Didn't vote for him. Sad to see what it did to people.

RickJWag• 8 years ago

Thankfully, we avoided war-supporting Hillary Clinton.

jfaucett2• 8 years ago

This is the opinion page of NYT. I wonder how far this perspective wanders from reality. If there's anything I've learned from studying the Arab-Israeli conflict its that most individual perspectives provide a universally bad account for causes, effects, and relations in a given situation, while simultaneously offering a rich amount of insight into human bias, error, emotion, and self deception.

That is, however, not to say that that is what this account is.

On that note, does anyone have a suggestion for the most non-biased sources i.e. books for understanding the conflict? I realize it's probably going to be very hard right now since distance in terms of time usually leads to more accurate and less biased analyses of a historical event.

merraksh• 8 years ago

'Some credible estimates put the number [of people who died since 2003] at more than one million.' 'The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. [...] The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do.'

webXL• 8 years ago

Man, that's depressing. While I never argued for invasion, I deeply regret supporting those who waged the war thinking that lack of support would lead to a quagmire and a situation that was worse than before, and that was pretty awful. The more I read about the war, I came to the conclusion it had absolutely no chance of being anything else. It's got to be one of the worst cases of collective sunk cost fallacy.

Empires are evil. America is one of the least evil, but that doesn't justify its empire. It might have been necessary to defeat Nazism, and to hold back the spread of communism, but we are squandering our future's prosperity to accomplish what exactly? I could understand if it was a question for survival, but American citizens enjoy so much security it's ridiculous, even 15 years ago. Even with all the mass shootings.

Boycott news media. Boycott national politics. The world will be better off.

redblacktree• 8 years ago

We were defending the petrodollar in Iraq. i.e. attempting to maintain American hegemony. Viewing all recent conflicts through that lens really helps to understand. "Yellow cake" and the like is just how it was sold.

mankash666• 8 years ago

Why oh why is this flagged? Does HN lack the stomach for civil debate about a contentious issue?

For those trigger happy flaggers - the responsibility ordained on you shouldn't be abused. Reddit will devolve into partisan piffle, HN IS the only space that's remotely capable of civility. So, don't flag - encourage diversity of thought!!

Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country

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