The Ukraine invasion is much different than Iraq

As the world watches Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine while the United States leads the charge to stop and punish the aggressor, “What about Iraq?” is a frequent retort meant to indict supposed American hypocrisy. Iraq has been invoked by Kremlin-friendly right-wingers such as activist/pundit Candace Owens (who has sarcastically asked why America was not financially sanctioned for the invasion of Iraq, which “slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians”) and by leftists such as MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hassan, who has argued, without excusing Russia, that the similarities between the two wars are clear and salient. Recent accounts of Russian atrocities have also been countered with references to civilian deaths in Iraq.

But one need not endorse the war in Iraq to see how specious the comparison is.

For one, unlike Ukraine, Iraq was led by a murderous dictator who had invaded another country (Kuwait) in 1990, had been defeated by a coalition that included the U.S., and had been allowed to stay in power by a truce on conditions that included inspections for weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was in violation of several United Nations Security Council resolutions, the last of which — passed in November 2002 — stipulated enforcement of compliance.

Some legal experts have argued that this resolution authorized action by the U.S.-led “Coalition of the Willing.” Most disagree, and then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that war could have been legally sanctioned only by another UN resolution specifically authorizing military force. (The U.S. and Great Britain tried but failed to get such a resolution.) Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the invasion was never condemned by the UN, and even Annan waited more than a year to say, when pressed directly, that it was illegal under the UN charter. That’s a stark contrast to the quick, near-unanimous condemnation of a war Russia started without even the pretense of justifying it to the UN.

The war in Iraq was also conducted by a coalition that had 31 member countries at the time of the invasion, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Spain and Turkey. Vladimir Putin found one on-andoff ally in the dictator next door, Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenka.

Moreover, if the scenario of invading soldiers being greeted as liberators was a lurid fantasy in Ukraine, it was, at least at first, actual reality in Iraq: the fall of Saddam

Hussein was met with widespread jubilation. In a 2004 poll, 46% of Iraqis said that things were better than before the war and 49% felt the invasion was absolutely or somewhat right; 39% felt things were worse and the invasion was wrong.

Those numbers fluctuated later as the situation worsened and attitudes toward coalition troops soured. Even so, by early 2009, only 28% saw the invasion as “absolutely wrong”; in other polls, as many as three out of four Iraqis agreed that Saddam’s removal was worth it despite the hardships. That’s remarkable, considering that most people instinctively loathe foreign invaders — particularly when there are major cultural and religious differences — and that at least some respondents had had privileged status under Saddam.

It is a terrible fact that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in coalition airstrikes and other military action (not counting those killed by the insurgency and in sectarian strife). But the tragic deaths of civilians in strikes at military targets are not morally equivalent to the Russians’ deliberate bombardment of civilians as a terror tactic, much less to their shocking brutality in occupied areas in Ukraine. Yes, some U.S. soldiers in Iraq committed war crimes, such as the 2005 killings of 24 civilians in Haditha, and were not properly punished; but even that is different from atrocities as a strategy.

It is also useful to remember that the alternative to Russia’s war for Ukrainians was peace. The alternative to America’s war in Iraq was a brutally repressive state that, according to Human Rights Watch, killed at least 250,000 of its own. Even President Obama, a consistent opponent of the war, acknowledged in his 2010 Oval Office remarks on the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq that American troops “defeated a regime that had terrorized its people.”

Some pundits such as Commentary’s Noah Rothman argue that the creation of a new Iraq — a developing democracy that poses no security threat — should be seen as a positive achievement. That’s a hard case to make when weighing the negatives: the loss of American and Iraqi lives; regional chaos and the rise of ISIS; U.S. involvement in an occupation that almost inevitably implicated us in human rights abuses; the damage to public trust at home from a war initially justified by claims about WMDs that officials knew to be based on unreliable evidence.

One may believe that the jury is still out on the war in Iraq, or that it stands clearly condemned as a terrible blunder. But to suggest an equivalency with Putin’s war in Ukraine is both historically and morally wrong.