Ukraine and Iraq, similarities and differences

In 2003 the US, UK, Australia, Spain and Poland, invaded Iraq.

The reason given was security concerns around Weapons of Mass Destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

US officials also said that Iraq supported ISIS which had bombed the US on 9/11. This was untrue and completely contrary to ISIS and Iraq inclinations

The coalition soldiers were told they would be welcomed as liberators. The Iraqi people saw them as invaders and fought against them.

The US invasion tactic was labelled Shock and Awe was described by its authors as 'a doctrine of rapid dominance requires the capability to disrupt "means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure", and, in practice, "the appropriate balance of Shock and Awe must cause ... the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of the adversary's society or render his ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction." Ullman and Wade Shock and Awe Chapter 5



In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine. The reason given was security concerns around NATO expansion. Russias security concerns around the expansion are real if overblown.

Russia has also claimed that the Ukraine government was a NAZI movement. This is untrue, though the influence of The Azov Battalion and The Right Sector is real.

Russian soldiers were told they would be welcomed as liberators. The Ukranian people saw them as invaders and fought against them.

The Russian invasion plan has many similarities with Shock and Awe, although its implementation appears so far to be less effective.

Iraq was subject to no fly zone enforced by those powers and WMD inspections as a result of its invasion of Kuwait, oppresion of Kurdish minority, and previous weapons programmes. None of which apply to Ukraine who in fact had nuclear weapons and gave them up in response to an agreement which Russia has breached multiple times.

Iraq was ruled by a dictator. Ukraine by a democratically elected president.

US shock and awe worked - conventional military forces were routed and the government which did not have popular legitimacy crumbled.
Russia has not defeated Ukraine military which is receiving huge outside support. Russians dont stand out in Ukraine the way an American does in Iraq.

It is the opposite situation. To deal with Iraq insurgency US needed more numbers and local nlg. Russia has those numbers.

odyssey06 said:

Iraq was subject to no fly zone enforced by those powers and WMD inspections as a result of its invasion of Kuwait, oppresion of Kurdish minority, and previous weapons programmes. None of which apply to Ukraine who in fact had nuclear weapons and gave them up in response to an agreement which Russia has breached multiple times.

Iraq was ruled by a dictator. Ukraine by a democratically elected president.

US shock and awe worked - conventional military forces were routed and the government which did not have popular legitimacy crumbled.
Russia has not defeated Ukraine military which is receiving huge outside support. Russians dont stand out in Ukraine the way an American does in Iraq.

It is the opposite situation. To deal with Iraq insurgency US needed more numbers and local nlg. Russia has those numbers.

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And:
The UN including Russia imposed crippling sanctions on Saddam for over a decade. Clearly the world wanted Saddam ousted, it took a relatively short US military campaign to achieve that end.
Saddam used chemical weapons against his fellow muslim neighbours, though they represented the majority sect of that religion in his own country. He certainly would have liked to develop WMD.
US had declared a War on Terror in response to 9/11, a war which would have had majority global sympathy. Saddam actively encouraged and supported Islamic terrorism against the West if not actually implicated in 9/11.
Saddam uniquely cheered (9/11):

Wiki said:

Almost all Muslim political and religious leaders condemned the (9/11) attacks. The leaders vehemently denouncing the attacks included the leaders of Egypt (Hosni Mubarak), the Palestinian Authority (Yasser Arafat), Libya (Muammar Gaddafi), Syria (Bashar al-Assad), Iran (Mohamed Khatami) and Pakistan (Pervez Musharraf). The sole exception was Iraq, when the then-president Saddam Hussein, said of the attacks that "the American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity"

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Iraq is almost certainly in a better place today than if Saddam had been left to sectarianly dominate Iraq.
The US had absolutely no imperialist designs in its ousting of Saddam.

The drawing of an equivalence between Iraq and Ukraine is right out of the Wallace/Daly/O'Toole playbook, having the support of 13 out of c. 700 democratically elected MEPs. @cremeegg you're better than that.

Iraq was a brutal dictatorship, and a huge human rights abuser. Ukraine is a democracy, admittedly with some issues to sort out with corruption and development of civil society.
The big mistake the US made was withdrawing, and basically handing the place over to the Iranian sphere of influence. That's down to Obama who was handed a pre-cooked win by GW Bush and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This allowed Iran to dominate Syria, Lebanon and menace its Sunni neighbours in the Gulf.

@cremeegg I'm sad to say you sound like the Mick-n-Ming-n-Claire freak show. Maybe rethink this a little bit?

Baby boomer said:

Iraq was a brutal dictatorship, and a huge human rights abuser. Ukraine is a democracy, admittedly with some issues to sort out with corruption and development of civil society.
The big mistake the US made was withdrawing, and basically handing the place over to the Iranian sphere of influence. That's down to Obama who was handed a pre-cooked win by GW Bush and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This allowed Iran to dominate Syria, Lebanon and menace its Sunni neighbours in the Gulf.

@cremeegg I'm sad to say you sound like the Mick-n-Ming-n-Claire freak show. Maybe rethink this a little bit?

Click to expand...

The US didn’t have the resources to win the peace in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Once Bush invaded Iraq they’d lost both (and destabilised the region, resulting in ISIS, Syria, Yemen and all the other horror shows we’ve seen in the last 20 years.
There’s a great truism in international affairs and the US ignored it. It goes like this; “You break it, you bought it.” Iraq etc was their mess and they walked away from it. Everything that has happened since is on them first. That doesn’t excuse the other players but when the question “okay, who started it?” is asked the fingers all point at them.

That also doesn’t make it the same as Ukrainian. The motives were completely different and a dictatorship invading a democracy with the intention of stripping its citizens of their democratic rights is an evil all of it’s own.