Sure. Suppose Bush had just lobbed some missiles into Taliban targets rather than invading Afghanistan? Would have done as much for far less. No propping up a “government” absolutely doomed to failure. The Soviets couldn’t govern Afghanistan with far less scruples than the US, what makes us thing nation building is even possible? Afghanistan, the “good war”, was a huge mistake, but orders of magnitude wiser than Iraq, the mother of all stupidity. Helping topple Khadafy was in retrospect a dumb move, but a move free of US lives lost and a cheap move as well.
When will we learn? Secular ruthless dictators in the Middle East are bad dudes. But replacing them with anarchy is far worse.
As opposed to the Iraq War, which cost a Trillion dollars, thousands of lives, and did… what? Depose a tin pot dictator who posed literally no threat to America?
Getting bin Laden (he was killed, not captured) was about the only ‘good’ use of boots on the ground in the last two decades. No American was killed, and very few were at risk. That should have been our focus from the beginning after 9/11 – getting bin Laden.
In Saddam’s Iraq, women could go to college, hold professional jobs, drive cars - all unaccompanied by any chaperones or whatnot.
That changed within weeks of when we took Baghdad. Right away, we made half of the Iraqi population worse off. And there’s no time in sight when life will get back to where it was for them.
So screw ‘boots on the ground.’ Screw invading countries where it’s gonna be completely beyond the capacity of the soldiers wearing those boots to tell friend from foe.
Every once in awhile, you’re still going to have one nation-state warring with another, with the partisans on both sides wearing nice, shiny uniforms so you can tell them apart. And we can perhaps successfully intervene in situations like that.
But the world has largely moved well beyond that sort of conflict. We’ve got a big hammer, but there’s no nail. Instead, it’s bumblebees and carpenter bees.
Hard to say. This seems to indicate that Iraq’s death rate has been a smooth downward trajectory since a little before the invasion, but that can’t possibly be right since there would have been a substantial spike in 2003. But there were fewer direct war casualties than total deaths ascribed to the sanctions. If you include the civilians who starved or were otherwise indirectly killed by the aftereffects of the war, then there are far more.
War certainly wasn’t better for us, but it’s hard to argue that the Iraqis aren’t better off, even as much of a disaster as it was. Except for the Sunnis, their lives are miserable because they aren’t in power anymore and that’s where the insurgency and ISIS operate. But the Shiites are a hell of a lot happier without Saddam, as are the Kurds.
More died from containment. And BTW, containment is a stupid policy against a fifth rate power. Containment was used as an alternative to war with the Soviet Union because war was unthinkable given the nuclear arms race. War with Iraq wasn’t unthinkable, it was just costly, and probably less costly than endless containment. If we’d continued the policy to today, the total cost since 1991 would have been nearly $1 trillion by now, not to mention who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis.