I’ll just let this article here, and that will be it from me on that topic:
The notion of ‘indirect deaths’ has to be used fairly carefully - methodologically, that 4.5 million number is based on an assumed coefficient (4) multiplied by the known number of direct deaths. There is a truth in there somewhere, indirect deaths without a doubt occur.
That article is particularly problematic in how it treats Afghanistan, counting as ‘indirect war deaths’ the suffering of Afghani civilians now that the economy has collapsed under the Taliban. But the level of economic activity, including direct food aid was an explicit function of the ongoing war. Children starving in Afghanistan now are not starving because of the war, they are starving because the war ended. Prior to that 2001 war, guess what was happening under Taliban rule? The economy was the same disaster it is now, people were starving (especially the ethnic minorities), and the country was de facto in civil war with the Pashtun Taliban controlling most of the country, but actively fighting the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara. The war never stopped, the US interlude was simply a prosperous period within a conflict that has really been going continuously since 1980. Seems a little absurd to label it a ‘post-9/11’ war.
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them spin doctors though, they love a good tale to try and spread the guilt around.
that country was poor before 9/11 and still is poor. as is most regions where the warlords have more power than the government. Taliban are just another warlord
I understand what you mean, but I guess that what can be retained from that is that every war will have very long-term consequences. Deadly, costly ones, with a lot of suffering.
My take is that every government starting a war has to be condemned, whomever that is. In Ukraine’s case, it’s clearly Russia for me, no discussion about that. But NATO gave them several terrible examples previously to that. Dictator Putin keeps saying that, I know, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, at least in part.
For me Putin and GW Bush for instance, are exactly the same kind of types: ruthless warmongers who despise human lives, even though their motives, or rather, their talk justifying the warmongering, may be different. But the motives were approximatively the same: conquering lands with a lot of oil and gas in the underground.
Two war criminals. The only difference between them in my book is roughly twenty years.
easy to say that. How old were you when 9/11 happened? I was in my early 20’s living in sin with my first wife. woke up to my phone ringing, it was my boss calling me to turn on the news.
The world came to a standstill, watched in horror as a second plane flew into the second tower. at that exact moment, you knew something terrible was happening. an act of war was declared on the US by Al-Qaeda, and the US doesn’t suffer fools lightly. Afghanistan harbored those who organized the attack.
Iraq was a separate entity to 9/11…
I don’t think oil was remotely close to a motivation for Afghanistan, which to me was in fact a justified war. Notably, that was a NATO action, invoking the self-defence clause. Iraq was a neo-con disaster, but to compare the sheer naivete of the neocons to the brutality of Putin’s pan-Russian project gets something spectacularly wrong.
Similarly, Libya’s Qaddafi provoked an intervention with repeated attacks. Had the West stayed behind to clean up the mess afterwards, it probably gets condemned as another Afghanistan situation.
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No comparison to Putin, but to call it ‘naivete’ gets something spectacularly wrong too.
I think the neocons came in two flavours - the ones who were really just expressing naked American power, and the genuinely naive kind that believed that if you just got rid of Saddam Hussein and took control for a couple of years, a pluralist democracy could be installed which would then happily sell their oil to the West. Many of them genuinely thought they would be able to be out in perhaps 2 months, and worse, planned accordingly. Hence the dismissal of Powell’s concerns about just how many US troops would be needed for the post-war rebuilding period. The Rumsfeld faction thought that would be the easy part, and getting it wrong destabilized the entire region.
In essence, there was more raw stupidity than malice than the mix from Putin’s Russia
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Not interested in the Putin comparison, they’re not comparable and there’s absolutely no doubt that Ukraine is much, much worse.
But just because they’r e not comparable there’s no need to use euphemisms and excuses either. Iraq was an act of pure aggression that was justified with ridiculous fabricated lies. And that was just the beginning. My opinion. Probably no use discussing this any further from my part though, feel free to tell my how wrong I am.
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No, I don’t disagree with you at all - they were ridiculous fabricated lies, and Iraq was pure aggression. I don’t think that is fundamentally incompatible with my take on at least a substantial part of American neocon thinking. The American capacity for self-delusion is absolutely staggering, and it reached a real apex in that thinking. Implicit in that naivete, to return to the word you object to, was brushing aside any consideration of thinking about the ‘project’ from the Iraqi point of view, dismissing it as irrelevant. I don’t think understanding that thought process in any way excuses it - there is a real brutality there.
A good friend was involved in the Chretien government’s discussions as to whether or not to join the US invasion of Iraq (Canada participated in Afghanistan, but not Iraq). The Bush administration was putting intense pressure on Canada to send forces, and even large sections of the Liberal Party were supportive of the idea. He counts participation in that decision as one of his proudest moments of public service, as one of the people asked to assess the American intelligence and make a recommendation. We would have been stuck there for a decade.
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Chretien ?
The friend in question worked in his PMO, the ‘political’ guy working with the civil servants to prepare the briefing.
Ok , but what does Chretien mean ? 
What Putin is doing is far worse, and a lot more brazen.
Where I can get close to agreement is in saying that since 9/11 the west has not covered itself in glory, and I haven’t seen any just wars in light of it. Because of that the sense of having any moral high ground has largely gone.
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and what did we do? Sell the Saudis arms, forge numerous business arrangements, and let them wield soft power while we turned a blind eye and took it out on tangential nations, stripping them of resources in the process.
It means Christian, but in this case, Jean Chretien, PM of Canada from 1993 to 2003. Notable because the Martin faction of the Liberal Party (Chretien also Liberal) was largely in favour of supporting the US, and Chretien’s decision created just one more line of attack for Martin. It was a somewhat unpopular decision in ‘elite’ circles of politics and business, and seen as making no sense given we were already involved in Afghanistan.
My friend’s counterpart in Blair’s office clearly took a different view.
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aha ! … I really was scratching my head trying to figure it out. I knew Chretien meant Christian but couldn’t imagine there being a ‘Christian’ party in power. Thanks for clearing it up.
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9/11 was a horrible thing at the time. I remember that day very clearly, but in my humble opinion, it doesn’t justify Iraq’s invasion. You only need to look at the death toll to see how disproportionate it was.
Also, Iraq was a war for the control of oil and gas, nothing else. 9/11 proved merely to be the perfect excuse for GW Bush and his gang of war criminals to push forward their invasion.
Yeah, Afghanistan is another kettle of fish. It was a big mistake to wade in there, but oil isn’t involved, obviously not.
However, regarding Iraq, to call the Bush administration naive is far too lenient on them. More than half a million deaths according to most accounts, near to a million according to others, isn’t just the feat of some naive lads who want to instore democracy and free trade. It was evil, brutal and destructive. It’s well-documented enough that greed was the driving factor behind it, just as greed is driving Putin today. (edit: just saw your answer to @anon27364116 
).
As for attacks from Gaddafi, I don’t know about that. He was a serial provocator, but was he ever involved in serious attacks against the west? He attacked Lybian rebels (who were of course armed and supported by the west), but beyond that, did he pose any serious threat to the western states previously to Lybia being clattered by NATO? If yes, I’d be happy to know more about that.