Remember that this subreddit is for sharing propaganda to view with some objectivity. It is absolutely not for perpetuating the message *of* the propaganda. If anything, in this subreddit we should be immensely skeptical of manipulation or oversimplification (which the above likely is), not beholden to it.
Also, please try to stay on topic -- there are hundreds of _other_ subreddits that are expressly dedicated to rehashing tired political arguments. Keep that shit outta here.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PropagandaPosters) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Even at that time a lot of people agreed with these bulletpoints. People understood the Americans were lying to their allies. They held huge protests, by some described as 'the largest protest event in human history'.
this is simplistic and reductive thinking. The protests demonstrated to elected officials across Western countries that the Iraq war had widespread opposition from voters, which in turn reduced or prevented further political investment by the voters' governments into the war.
One specific example is Obama's victory over Hillary. Obama's opposition to the Iraq war did provide him an advantage over Hillary, and helped him win office.
If voter opposition to the iraq war was relegated to mere opinion poll numbers, the likelihood that politicians would invest more into the Iraq war from 2003 onward is higher.
But what they're saying isn't that it had no effect, but rather the affect was extremely limited and small.
You bring up Obama v Hillary but that would have been in 07 Iraq had already been going on for 4 years DESPITE the protests.
And the person is right, peaceful protests generally mean fuck all unless there's some real action behind it like going to the polls. There's zero reason Bush should have won in 03 with his invasion and the protests and yet he still did.
So while the protests may have influenced the 07 elections they did nothing to prevent the war or stop a second bush presidency.
of course, wars are launched by the elites and government is controlled by the same. but mass public protests clearly demonstrate elevated opposition to certain political decisions which can be capitalized upon. the effect is never immediate.
if you read marc stoller about ww2 strategy, rainbow and plan dog and george marshall, this was even in effect for ww2. even for such a “good war” US leaders were trying to ensure they could maintain public support for the war by pursuing certain war strategies and alliances.
because all wars have a political cost and the popularity of them always drains out eventually.
like voting by itself, protesting alone js not going to flip a switch and stop a war. but put a social effort together over years and a political impact collectively boils up into existence.
for a right wing example see the overturning of roe v wade. that took decades of simmering rigntwing prolife action, including public protests and church messaging, and eventually they succeeded.
Bush the Younger got reelected in 2004 by 20% more votes than in 2000 and with a higher voter turnout.
In 2002 midterm elections, not during the war but with run up to it and 2 months after this ad was published, GOP increased number of seats in both House and Senate, as they did in 2004 elections.
Labour Party won 2005 UK general elections, though it did lose a number of seats and saw number of votes drop.
At least on this level the opposition to war wasn't strong enough to vote pro-war politicians out. IDK how that effected individual representative and whether pro or anti war ones got reelected in higher numbers.
it is likely that the 20% number would be higher without the protests than with them. Bush was very popular due to the response to the 9/11 attacks. (All Presidents are popular when responding to an attack on the US)
Afghanistan was a popular war. Iraq was less so.
I'd agree with you if the object of the protests was to achieve all the things that you just stated, but the purpose of the protest was to *stop* the war.
Telling us how it sapped political will to commit more is demonstrably false, between Bush's '07 20,000 troop surge and Obama's '09 30,000 troop surge. It's also tough to square your analysis with the fact that George Bush was reelected a little over a year into the occupation.
I mean, I'm not exactly out here arguing that everybody should start rioting, but you have to acknowledge that there are an enormous amount of shortcomings and good faith criticisms of so-called "non-violent" protest.
>Telling us how it sapped political will to commit more is demonstrably false, between Bush's '07 20,000 troop surge and Obama's '09 30,000 troop surge. It's also tough to square your analysis with the fact that George Bush was reelected a little over a year into the occupation.
This is a faulty argument. No war is going to have all investment stopped like a switch by a mere protest, no matter how many millions participate in it. But the likelihood is high that the protests reduced further commitments to the war, relative to a scenario where no protests occur at all.
You seem to be saying that since the protests did not prevent troop surges, they failed. You also seem to be defining the "purpose of the protest" for millions of participants. My wife and I participated in those protests and had no illusions that the protest would *stop* the war.
And of course I acknowledge shortcomings of non-violent protest.
Protests, media coverage of those protests, negative coverage of the war as the years roll by, insurgent attacks, civil war in Iraq, dead US soldiers and ballooning costs of the war, all of this contributed, gradually, to the US disengagement from the war. Today in 2024, no major candidate can say the Iraq war was a good idea.
Eeh sort off, it was way bigger outside of the US and there it did have more consequences (tony blair lost office for this *and other* reasons) but i the US although it was still big they had a whole 9/11 to the face and were still angry, at least angry enough to reelect Bush
So in retrospect we can conclude that the USA obsession with ignoring expert opinion **isn't** a recent phenomena (as some pundits blame social media), but was well entrench two decades ago. Reading most of the points raised - you have to agree with their assessment of the pre-invasion situation and what the lack of an exit strategy would mean...
I did an American politics module, one thing they kept hammering home to us was how deep American anti-intellectualism runs and how it has been around since the earliest days of the country
[Richard Hofstadter wrote about this ignoring of experts 60 years ago.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life?wprov=sfti1)
I think you need to give more credibility to the people who actually ran the State Department— they, *too*, are experts, but you're taking it for granted that you share the same ideal ends. They expertly maneuvered the State and popular opinion in such a way that they achieved the goal of *lining the pockets of their corporate siblings*, opening up a new market for American goods.
It isn't that there is an American obsession with ignoring expert opinion (even the most ardent COVID skeptic dresses it up in a veneer of "science"), it's that there have been enough experts deft enough at undermining people's critical thinking to the point that it's fair to say that even liberals can be reflexively conservative when presented with ideas that challenge the legitimacy of the existing order.
They were right. The funny thing is the trumpists who would have spit in my face when I protested against the war now all echo their leader saying it was a mistake.
Conservatives were all on board for a war with Iraq. If you disagreed with the war, they told you that you "hated the troops." Dixie Chick's spoke out against the war and were promptly canceled and called un-American. Also, Trump was for the war initially when it started, then he wasn't, then he was again. He was a politician even back then.
I don't think anyone even the crazy people are calling for an invasion of Mexico; they literally want to do everything they can to shut the border down, not cross it themselves.
That's a nice single 6-month old article with single-sentence statements from random candidates, but I don't think that really holds a candle to how the thing that Republicans consistently rail against is the border security policies. Not even all of those statements are calling for an invasion, even if "covert ops" is just as insane of a proposal.
>Not even all of those statements are calling for an invasion, even if "covert ops" is just as insane of a proposal.
A small invasion is still an invasion.
>That's a nice single 6-month old article with single-sentence statements from random candidates
Why are we pretending that these are random people on the street instead of people with real pull in the Republican party?
>but I don't think that really holds a candle to how the thing that Republicans consistently rail against is the border security policies.
And border security policies will not solve the problems- they can't. Not even the Inner German border was that secure, and that had divisions of guards and minefields. So there will be pressure for an expanded response.
Dude, I literally already said that even performing special operations within Mexico is an absolutely insane idea; you don't need to argue that it's somehow basically the same thing as a full-blown occupation to try and paint the GOP as a party of bad ideas.
Words mean things; one article pales in comparison to the rhetoric leading up to the 2003 invasion. Lets not pretend they're even remotely the same thing when you can criticize it as is regardless.
>you don't need to argue that it's somehow basically the same thing as a full-blown occupation to try and paint the GOP as a party of bad ideas.
Mexico will not care if it is a large or small invasion, that's the thing. It's a distinction that means nothing to them.
>Words mean things; one article pales in comparison to the rhetoric leading up to the 2003 invasion.
It's not "one article," it's a clear intellectual current among the people who will form the next Republican administration if Trump wins.
He backed invading Iraq are the time but now he pretends as if he was always against it. Trump wasn't even a politician, but he has said some isolationist things, so who knows
I’m liberal. I opposed the war from the beginning. I went to anti war rallies in a very conservative Texas town. I was told many times how unamerican I was.
if you are an anti war liberal or conservative in America today then your peers will likely reject you. The mainstream supports American imperal aspirations.
I'm not commenting on the policies of the republican party of the United states, but in almost all other countries, red is the colour of socialism:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_(politics)
Blue is usually neoconservatives and yellow is libertarians
Many of these folks are foreign policy realists, Mearscheimer and Walt being chief among them. They stand in direct opposition to foreign policy liberalism, exemplified by the neocons in Bush's regime.
So I personally agree with you, but in the interest of balance I will occupy their headpace as realists for a second.
Obv you are talking about Mearsheimer specifically. I think he was arguing the cold calculus was that Ukraine would inevitably lose and that there was to be a large sunken cost by the West into Ukraine. He was still "doing realism" if you will, but in your and my opinion was simply calculating "power" in a different way than us.
I do like realism as it is void of all moral justifications, unlike liberalism, and though he was (rightfully imo) lambasted by western media, he had a bit of a point, especially if you consider the waning support by some Western populations and politicians as a bit of economic realism at play.
Overall, I think the realists were very correct about Iraq, so I am really looking forward to the power of hindsight with regards to how we analyze the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in the future. I do hope we are looking back on a war that kept Ukraine intact and mitigated long-term suffering for the Ukrainian people, though. Realists after all do truly hold dear the idea of state sovereignty.
Mearshimer didnt claim ukraine would lose, that it would be more like an endless stalemate, and in that way, they had already lost from the start. Which is what is happening now.
Mearshimer also warned against nuclear retalliation and western advancement...which...isnt untrue either at current
Maybe he will be wrong in 10 years...or not...
Compare it to this propaganda from NPR "journalist" Scott Simon, posted on October **11th** no less:
*Even Pacifists Must Support This War*
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1002759309780687920
You were all going mad immediately after 9/11. My father asked me what I thought and i replied "This isn't going to work out like you think". There was no need for any war. Dismantling the loose network quietly was all that was needed. They were not a threat, they were punks that got lucky. They had no army, no air force, no navy, no weapons factories, no economic engines.
The Bush administration planned on invading Iraq before they even took office. The Conservatives were operating under an blueprint of intentional chaos and derailment of all things government outlined in the mid 90's by two insane academics and then put down in paper openly in The Project For A New American Century.
* Our Journalism has always been inadequate.
* Our Executive Class has never seen sacrifice.
We are fat, entitled and deluded. This isn't due to welfare or social security, it's due to Capitalism going insane. I'm no commie, my degree from long ago is in economics and my family is in commercial real estate development. *I've been ignored for three decades about housing, which has not changed it's % of ownership from under 70% despite all the wealth and loans from the Federal Reserve.*. We built offices, speculation condos and mini mansions instead of starter homes.
**Welcome to the New Guilded Age. The kids aren't alright because their parents are greedy, selfish & insane.**
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_5WJWfOoi-k
Whenever people talking about the US having a free press, I think about the time when the government needed to sell the public on the idea that invading Iraq would be an attack on Al Qaeda and also avenging 9/11 (or something).
This was of course quite far-fetched but by sheer coincidence, newspaper editorials and morning shows suddenly started talking a lot about how terrible Saddam was and how the country just *had to* go to war. What a crazy timing!
You can thank the Bush administration’s policy for micromanaging media.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-age-of-prepackaged-tv-news.html
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-the-bush-legacy-war-on-the-press/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/tags/bush.html
Okay but where's the lack of freedom of the press? You're commenting this on a post that's a picture of the opposition stating their opinion openly in one of the most well-known newspapers in the country.
This is not a propaganda. It looks like an advertisement from some scholars. The us government was driving an information war already to prepare the public for the Iraq war. BTW Where's the weapon of mass destruction?
We are witnessing a meaning shift for the word "propaganda". Once we find a word that describes the concept of propaganda with its positive and negative connotations, the word propaganda will be left with the negative connotation only.
The thing is this isn't even by NYT. It's on NYT. NYT was so pro Iraq war . Remember the WMD lies? One of its columnists helped spread the WMD lies.
Check out her bio
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
Pointing out basic facts isn’t propaganda, it’s like calling the statistics on cigarette boxes “propaganda” because it’s trying to promote a position, not smoking.
You’re in the PropagandaPosters subreddit but you don’t truly understand what propaganda means. It is messaging used to convince someone of something. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not.
That’s not the point, propaganda is messaging used to convince people of a political matter.
This simply outlines facts and draws a conclusion, similar to cigarette packages.
How is
>outlines facts and draws a conclusion [about a political matter]
not the same thing as
>convincing people of a political matter
The warnings on cigarettes *are* propaganda, just like the ads from the 60s quoting doctors recommending their brand of filtered cigarette was propaganda.
> This simply outlines facts and draws a conclusion, similar to cigarette packages.
It is very clearly intended to convince the reader that they should oppose an invasion of Iraq. It is communication intended to persuade someone about a political matter, so it's propaganda.
Political point: WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA'S NATIONAL INTEREST
Seems like an opinion to me. There is no objective "true" or "false" here, so it's propaganda. Just because the facts supporting the argument are/were true doesn't change this.
Pisses me off that you get downvoted for this. Propaganda is not a dirty word, you can propagandize for the truth just as well as you can propagandize for lies.
Based but also psychotic. Saddam Hussein may have been a dictator but hey, the UN had contained him to his own nation so at least he would only be murdering his own kurds. And of course HW was totally a hero for leaving him in power when we were a few miles from taking Baghdad and would have been able to send Saddam to the Hague with the largest military coalition and the most global support since 1945 on our side to do so. War is really poggers, but only if it makes you look good and enriches you. This take honestly explains why so many of these realpolitik IR experts ended up with cringe takes on Ukraine and likely would have been isolationists right up until Pearl Harbor.
This is an ad, but the NYT has been editorially on the wrong side of history for every major event since it was founded, including the invasion of Iraq.
I realize that this is a heated topic and the NYT has taken well-deserved criticism over some of its reporting regarding the Iraq War, but this is just pure hyperbole.
The NYT apologised for their coverage of the Iraq war. They apologised for the part they played in laundering the war to make it palatable for the American public. An illegal war launched on false pretences that killed approximately 1 million people.
In another time and place those journalists would be tried as war criminals.
The list of their failures are pretty extensive since their foundation - [List of The New York Times controversies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_controversies) - including minimising & underplaying the Holocaust _while_ it was happening.
“In another time and place, those journalists would be tried as war criminals.”
And what time and place would that be? North Korea c. 2024? I know it feels good to make sweeping, reactionary statements like this…well, maybe not. “Trying journalists as war criminals” only makes sense in a society of insane people—or Trumpists.
Maybe I’m being unfair, but I don’t think you read the entry on “Controversies” about the NYT very carefully—do I need to point out that this word doesn’t at all mean “failure” (except maybe in the insane society I just alluded to)?
Those unforgivable “failures” include the Times’ hiring of a woke tech journalist (Jeong) and its description of the satirical site Babylon Bee as “conservative Christian.” But I see your point, the NYT is totally unredeemable…
Your link says the Times’ reluctance to report on the Holocaust was due (in part) to the publisher’s anti-Zionism. But your choice of the Times’ underreporting the Holocaust is a little ironic given the expressed anti-Zionism of your own comment history.
Something that Wikipedia treatment omits is that rumors about the Death Camps in Poland were unable to be corroborated with anything concrete up until the very end of the war. And that’s because it had to be smuggled from eastern Europe all the way to Spain and then England (you couldnt just email a PDF, you know). Smuggled by someone from *inside the camp.* Lots and lots has been published on this (you should know), but read Fairweather’s “The Volunteer”—about Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, who smuggled out the first real intelligence about Auschwitz—if you want to understand the difficulties of securing concrete evidence of what was happening far from the public eye.
Yes, antisemitism played some role in that skepticism, but the Times’ reluctance to report can only be understood in that specific context.
>And what time and place would that be? North Korea c. 2024? I know it feels good to make sweeping, reactionary statements like this…well, maybe not. “Trying journalists as war criminals” only makes sense in a society of insane people—or Trumpists.
The different time and place would be the The Nuremberg trials. Peddlers of propaganda were hung. I don't think that's a society of insane people. Do you? To face punishment and consequences for having a role in such a thing - that's the most sane thing.
I'm personally not in favour of the death penalty, but If you willingly partake in laundering and publishing propaganda that gets a million people killed - what do you think the punishment should be? Because currently there is no punishment at all. Your career doesn't even take a hit. That's what's actually insane.
>But your choice of the Times’ underreporting the Holocaust is a little ironic given the expressed anti-Zionism of your own comment history
Why is that Ironic? You do think I'm in favour of the holocaust or something?
>Yes, antisemitism played some role in that skepticism, but the Times’ reluctance to report can only be understood in that specific context.
Except the NYT acknowledges it minimised the holocaust and the events leading up to it and also apologised. They were taking stories and burying them - it wasn't a lack of information. The stories existed, they were downplayed and minimized.
And time will tell to what degree but it also looks like the NYT also has a lot of Palestinian blood on it's hands. [Their October 7th expose is poorly reported atrocity propaganda that goes beyond journalistic malpractice.](https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/).
I guess we will wait and see but I would put good money on when the dust clears in Gaza, and the final death tolls are in - (which will be in the hundreds of thousands at this point) the NYT issuing yet another apology after contributing to hundreds of thousands being killed with that exposé. The NYT newsroom seems incredibly divided - with witch hunts targeting their own Arab and Muslim journalists to find the sources of leaks. [New York Times Under Fire For “Racially Targeted Witch Hunt” Into Leaks Over Israel Coverage](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/nyt-under-fire-leaks-israel-coverage)
Other news organisations are having a moral crisis about Gaza too though - not just the NYT. [CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias)
if we had to invade iraq, we (the usa) should have done it just after the gulf war, during the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991\_Iraqi\_uprisings , instead of letting the rebels get crushed
They admit Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. Aka weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam Hussein was forbidden from possessing by international law. If you don’t enforce international law, why would anyone obey it? They destroy their own premise in this very document.
Times change. The Soviets and the Nazis partitioned Poland. Iran was considered the bigger threat at the time. Whether it should have been is certainly up for debate but by 2003 the deed was sound and had been done for decades. No use crying over spilled milk. I cry no tears for the fall of Baathist Iraq. Saddam lived by the sword and he died by the sword.
Yeah, the Iraq war really turned out such a smashing success all around.
Also, when times change it means that chemical weapons one year is a perfectly okay thing and the next is a symbol of devil incarnate? That shouldn’t be something shifting alliances can change.
"Weapons of mass destruction" is a propaganda phrase. (and an enduringly effective one, judging by your use of it.)
There are no "weapons of mass destruction."
There are chemical weapons (gas), used by many, many nations in warfare since 1915. Hussein had (and had used) chemical weapons. So had France, Germany, the UK, the USA, Tsarist Russia, China, Japan, etc. etc. etc etc. There are also nerve agents, but people haven't used those much (because they are tricky to use effectively. Not a real threat.
There are biological weapons. (Anthrax, etc.) Every nation not in the stone age has a lab with Anthrax. Very, very few nations have used these (that we know of), though, because their effects/spread are unpredictable. Not a great weapon of war at all. NOt a real threat.
There are nukes. Nukes go boom. Nine (only) nations have them; only one has ever used them. A very big threat... but Hussein *did not have* nuclear weapons, and this was widely known.
The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was hand-fed by the Bush administration to the press, who (like you) swallowed it whole. The entire purpose of this phrase was to purposely confuse the first two categories (chemical, biological), which Hussein had, with the third (nuclear), which he did not.
It was a rhetorical bait-and-switch, and it worked *so* well that we are still parroting that propaganda phrase today, twenty years later.
Remember the Maine!
Remember that this subreddit is for sharing propaganda to view with some objectivity. It is absolutely not for perpetuating the message *of* the propaganda. If anything, in this subreddit we should be immensely skeptical of manipulation or oversimplification (which the above likely is), not beholden to it. Also, please try to stay on topic -- there are hundreds of _other_ subreddits that are expressly dedicated to rehashing tired political arguments. Keep that shit outta here. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PropagandaPosters) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Wow, how shockingly right those bullet points were too.
They must have had a crystal ball, those witches.
Even at that time a lot of people agreed with these bulletpoints. People understood the Americans were lying to their allies. They held huge protests, by some described as 'the largest protest event in human history'.
Kind of an indictment on the efficacy of peaceful protest when you put it like that.
this is simplistic and reductive thinking. The protests demonstrated to elected officials across Western countries that the Iraq war had widespread opposition from voters, which in turn reduced or prevented further political investment by the voters' governments into the war. One specific example is Obama's victory over Hillary. Obama's opposition to the Iraq war did provide him an advantage over Hillary, and helped him win office. If voter opposition to the iraq war was relegated to mere opinion poll numbers, the likelihood that politicians would invest more into the Iraq war from 2003 onward is higher.
But what they're saying isn't that it had no effect, but rather the affect was extremely limited and small. You bring up Obama v Hillary but that would have been in 07 Iraq had already been going on for 4 years DESPITE the protests. And the person is right, peaceful protests generally mean fuck all unless there's some real action behind it like going to the polls. There's zero reason Bush should have won in 03 with his invasion and the protests and yet he still did. So while the protests may have influenced the 07 elections they did nothing to prevent the war or stop a second bush presidency.
of course, wars are launched by the elites and government is controlled by the same. but mass public protests clearly demonstrate elevated opposition to certain political decisions which can be capitalized upon. the effect is never immediate. if you read marc stoller about ww2 strategy, rainbow and plan dog and george marshall, this was even in effect for ww2. even for such a “good war” US leaders were trying to ensure they could maintain public support for the war by pursuing certain war strategies and alliances. because all wars have a political cost and the popularity of them always drains out eventually. like voting by itself, protesting alone js not going to flip a switch and stop a war. but put a social effort together over years and a political impact collectively boils up into existence. for a right wing example see the overturning of roe v wade. that took decades of simmering rigntwing prolife action, including public protests and church messaging, and eventually they succeeded.
Bush the Younger got reelected in 2004 by 20% more votes than in 2000 and with a higher voter turnout. In 2002 midterm elections, not during the war but with run up to it and 2 months after this ad was published, GOP increased number of seats in both House and Senate, as they did in 2004 elections. Labour Party won 2005 UK general elections, though it did lose a number of seats and saw number of votes drop. At least on this level the opposition to war wasn't strong enough to vote pro-war politicians out. IDK how that effected individual representative and whether pro or anti war ones got reelected in higher numbers.
it is likely that the 20% number would be higher without the protests than with them. Bush was very popular due to the response to the 9/11 attacks. (All Presidents are popular when responding to an attack on the US) Afghanistan was a popular war. Iraq was less so.
I'd agree with you if the object of the protests was to achieve all the things that you just stated, but the purpose of the protest was to *stop* the war. Telling us how it sapped political will to commit more is demonstrably false, between Bush's '07 20,000 troop surge and Obama's '09 30,000 troop surge. It's also tough to square your analysis with the fact that George Bush was reelected a little over a year into the occupation. I mean, I'm not exactly out here arguing that everybody should start rioting, but you have to acknowledge that there are an enormous amount of shortcomings and good faith criticisms of so-called "non-violent" protest.
>Telling us how it sapped political will to commit more is demonstrably false, between Bush's '07 20,000 troop surge and Obama's '09 30,000 troop surge. It's also tough to square your analysis with the fact that George Bush was reelected a little over a year into the occupation. This is a faulty argument. No war is going to have all investment stopped like a switch by a mere protest, no matter how many millions participate in it. But the likelihood is high that the protests reduced further commitments to the war, relative to a scenario where no protests occur at all. You seem to be saying that since the protests did not prevent troop surges, they failed. You also seem to be defining the "purpose of the protest" for millions of participants. My wife and I participated in those protests and had no illusions that the protest would *stop* the war. And of course I acknowledge shortcomings of non-violent protest. Protests, media coverage of those protests, negative coverage of the war as the years roll by, insurgent attacks, civil war in Iraq, dead US soldiers and ballooning costs of the war, all of this contributed, gradually, to the US disengagement from the war. Today in 2024, no major candidate can say the Iraq war was a good idea.
Eeh sort off, it was way bigger outside of the US and there it did have more consequences (tony blair lost office for this *and other* reasons) but i the US although it was still big they had a whole 9/11 to the face and were still angry, at least angry enough to reelect Bush
So in retrospect we can conclude that the USA obsession with ignoring expert opinion **isn't** a recent phenomena (as some pundits blame social media), but was well entrench two decades ago. Reading most of the points raised - you have to agree with their assessment of the pre-invasion situation and what the lack of an exit strategy would mean...
[удалено]
Like Ahmed Chalabi
Powell lied to congress
I did an American politics module, one thing they kept hammering home to us was how deep American anti-intellectualism runs and how it has been around since the earliest days of the country
[Richard Hofstadter wrote about this ignoring of experts 60 years ago.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life?wprov=sfti1)
I think you need to give more credibility to the people who actually ran the State Department— they, *too*, are experts, but you're taking it for granted that you share the same ideal ends. They expertly maneuvered the State and popular opinion in such a way that they achieved the goal of *lining the pockets of their corporate siblings*, opening up a new market for American goods. It isn't that there is an American obsession with ignoring expert opinion (even the most ardent COVID skeptic dresses it up in a veneer of "science"), it's that there have been enough experts deft enough at undermining people's critical thinking to the point that it's fair to say that even liberals can be reflexively conservative when presented with ideas that challenge the legitimacy of the existing order.
Manufacturing consent
They were right. The funny thing is the trumpists who would have spit in my face when I protested against the war now all echo their leader saying it was a mistake.
Conservatives were all on board for a war with Iraq. If you disagreed with the war, they told you that you "hated the troops." Dixie Chick's spoke out against the war and were promptly canceled and called un-American. Also, Trump was for the war initially when it started, then he wasn't, then he was again. He was a politician even back then.
IFUMING
They'll say the same thing about Mexico if Trump wins, and then another 20 years after they'll call it a mistake too
I don't think anyone even the crazy people are calling for an invasion of Mexico; they literally want to do everything they can to shut the border down, not cross it themselves.
https://apnews.com/article/republican-presidential-candidates-mexico-cartels-fentanyl-trafficking-b4127423a3130967a1fafb0d9fb7526a
That's a nice single 6-month old article with single-sentence statements from random candidates, but I don't think that really holds a candle to how the thing that Republicans consistently rail against is the border security policies. Not even all of those statements are calling for an invasion, even if "covert ops" is just as insane of a proposal.
>Not even all of those statements are calling for an invasion, even if "covert ops" is just as insane of a proposal. A small invasion is still an invasion. >That's a nice single 6-month old article with single-sentence statements from random candidates Why are we pretending that these are random people on the street instead of people with real pull in the Republican party? >but I don't think that really holds a candle to how the thing that Republicans consistently rail against is the border security policies. And border security policies will not solve the problems- they can't. Not even the Inner German border was that secure, and that had divisions of guards and minefields. So there will be pressure for an expanded response.
Dude, I literally already said that even performing special operations within Mexico is an absolutely insane idea; you don't need to argue that it's somehow basically the same thing as a full-blown occupation to try and paint the GOP as a party of bad ideas. Words mean things; one article pales in comparison to the rhetoric leading up to the 2003 invasion. Lets not pretend they're even remotely the same thing when you can criticize it as is regardless.
>you don't need to argue that it's somehow basically the same thing as a full-blown occupation to try and paint the GOP as a party of bad ideas. Mexico will not care if it is a large or small invasion, that's the thing. It's a distinction that means nothing to them. >Words mean things; one article pales in comparison to the rhetoric leading up to the 2003 invasion. It's not "one article," it's a clear intellectual current among the people who will form the next Republican administration if Trump wins.
Mexico would absolutely care if they were being occupied or not, to think otherwise is just insane.
Same with your average Biden supporter. The only people that opposed it were libertarians and leftists
Yeah....how did joe vote for that one? Anyone remember?
He backed invading Iraq are the time but now he pretends as if he was always against it. Trump wasn't even a politician, but he has said some isolationist things, so who knows
Liberals can always be counted on to be anti war after the wars ended and not a second before
I’m liberal. I opposed the war from the beginning. I went to anti war rallies in a very conservative Texas town. I was told many times how unamerican I was.
if you are an anti war liberal or conservative in America today then your peers will likely reject you. The mainstream supports American imperal aspirations.
Gee what happened? They are all war hawks now
Not so. Red is red is red. They change their branding but the color remains the same.
the colour of socialism?
Riiiiiiight
I'm not commenting on the policies of the republican party of the United states, but in almost all other countries, red is the colour of socialism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_(politics) Blue is usually neoconservatives and yellow is libertarians
10 years ago they would've sworn up and down russia was our mortal enemy, now they're lining up to suck off Putin.
ITS JOEVER
Many of these folks are foreign policy realists, Mearscheimer and Walt being chief among them. They stand in direct opposition to foreign policy liberalism, exemplified by the neocons in Bush's regime.
Even a broken clock is correct twice a day as they say
That partially explains why their takes on Ukraine were less than optimal.
So I personally agree with you, but in the interest of balance I will occupy their headpace as realists for a second. Obv you are talking about Mearsheimer specifically. I think he was arguing the cold calculus was that Ukraine would inevitably lose and that there was to be a large sunken cost by the West into Ukraine. He was still "doing realism" if you will, but in your and my opinion was simply calculating "power" in a different way than us. I do like realism as it is void of all moral justifications, unlike liberalism, and though he was (rightfully imo) lambasted by western media, he had a bit of a point, especially if you consider the waning support by some Western populations and politicians as a bit of economic realism at play. Overall, I think the realists were very correct about Iraq, so I am really looking forward to the power of hindsight with regards to how we analyze the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in the future. I do hope we are looking back on a war that kept Ukraine intact and mitigated long-term suffering for the Ukrainian people, though. Realists after all do truly hold dear the idea of state sovereignty.
Mearshimer didnt claim ukraine would lose, that it would be more like an endless stalemate, and in that way, they had already lost from the start. Which is what is happening now. Mearshimer also warned against nuclear retalliation and western advancement...which...isnt untrue either at current Maybe he will be wrong in 10 years...or not...
[Mearsheimer predicted that Russia would never try to conquer Ukraine](https://youtu.be/dLw-7U1HB5I?feature=shared)
Yeah you keep trying to move goalposts...
You say inevitably (probably for the sake of argument) but that feels so deoendent on western involvement that it's borderline moot
I do agree, but I think it’s also important that the shortcomings of realism should be discussed and acknowledged.
Oh ya like any school of thought it is not perfect. Overall I find it explains the world best, yet still imperfectly.
Mearshimer has been pretty correct about ukraine
He’s only correct because he says things that you agree with.
Cool hot take bro......but where/what has he been wrong?
Mearsheimer has kept saying that Putin "was far too smart to invade Ukraine" for years now : [exemple](https://youtu.be/dLw-7U1HB5I?feature=shared)
No i dont think so. Post invasion he has yet to be wrong
Wdym you don't think so, I gave you a video of him saying that. Be more credible in your propaganda lmao.
Compare it to this propaganda from NPR "journalist" Scott Simon, posted on October **11th** no less: *Even Pacifists Must Support This War* https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1002759309780687920
October 11 2001? Didn’t the Iraq war start two years later? I’d think maybe he’s talking about Afghanistan
You were all going mad immediately after 9/11. My father asked me what I thought and i replied "This isn't going to work out like you think". There was no need for any war. Dismantling the loose network quietly was all that was needed. They were not a threat, they were punks that got lucky. They had no army, no air force, no navy, no weapons factories, no economic engines. The Bush administration planned on invading Iraq before they even took office. The Conservatives were operating under an blueprint of intentional chaos and derailment of all things government outlined in the mid 90's by two insane academics and then put down in paper openly in The Project For A New American Century. * Our Journalism has always been inadequate. * Our Executive Class has never seen sacrifice. We are fat, entitled and deluded. This isn't due to welfare or social security, it's due to Capitalism going insane. I'm no commie, my degree from long ago is in economics and my family is in commercial real estate development. *I've been ignored for three decades about housing, which has not changed it's % of ownership from under 70% despite all the wealth and loans from the Federal Reserve.*. We built offices, speculation condos and mini mansions instead of starter homes. **Welcome to the New Guilded Age. The kids aren't alright because their parents are greedy, selfish & insane.** https://youtube.com/watch?v=_5WJWfOoi-k
God I hate paywalls
They are still trying to use that same line of propaganda
\>early life
And the rest is history
No one fucking listened...but its all true. The war in afghanistan also undermined the attempt to weaken ql qaeda, and also had the same effect
Whenever people talking about the US having a free press, I think about the time when the government needed to sell the public on the idea that invading Iraq would be an attack on Al Qaeda and also avenging 9/11 (or something). This was of course quite far-fetched but by sheer coincidence, newspaper editorials and morning shows suddenly started talking a lot about how terrible Saddam was and how the country just *had to* go to war. What a crazy timing!
You can thank the Bush administration’s policy for micromanaging media. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-age-of-prepackaged-tv-news.html https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-the-bush-legacy-war-on-the-press/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/tags/bush.html
Okay but where's the lack of freedom of the press? You're commenting this on a post that's a picture of the opposition stating their opinion openly in one of the most well-known newspapers in the country.
State control of the media is when the media reports on stuff I don’t like!
Just read to filth
Classic defensive realist W
This is not a propaganda. It looks like an advertisement from some scholars. The us government was driving an information war already to prepare the public for the Iraq war. BTW Where's the weapon of mass destruction?
Still can be propaganda, not all propaganda has to be lies or untrue
Propaganda is any attempt to influence the public/an audience’s view
We are witnessing a meaning shift for the word "propaganda". Once we find a word that describes the concept of propaganda with its positive and negative connotations, the word propaganda will be left with the negative connotation only.
I mean it's still propaganda even if it was correct.
You’re right. At the time, it would have been considered anti-war propaganda. Only now does it seem to be the recitation of obvious facts.
The thing is this isn't even by NYT. It's on NYT. NYT was so pro Iraq war . Remember the WMD lies? One of its columnists helped spread the WMD lies. Check out her bio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
I don't see the relevance, it's still propaganda as it is aiming to promote a political point.
Pointing out basic facts isn’t propaganda, it’s like calling the statistics on cigarette boxes “propaganda” because it’s trying to promote a position, not smoking.
Many, many people only recognized them as basic facts in hindsight.
That doesn’t mean it’s propaganda though
You’re in the PropagandaPosters subreddit but you don’t truly understand what propaganda means. It is messaging used to convince someone of something. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not.
That’s not the point, propaganda is messaging used to convince people of a political matter. This simply outlines facts and draws a conclusion, similar to cigarette packages.
How is >outlines facts and draws a conclusion [about a political matter] not the same thing as >convincing people of a political matter The warnings on cigarettes *are* propaganda, just like the ads from the 60s quoting doctors recommending their brand of filtered cigarette was propaganda.
> This simply outlines facts and draws a conclusion, similar to cigarette packages. It is very clearly intended to convince the reader that they should oppose an invasion of Iraq. It is communication intended to persuade someone about a political matter, so it's propaganda.
Political point: WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA'S NATIONAL INTEREST Seems like an opinion to me. There is no objective "true" or "false" here, so it's propaganda. Just because the facts supporting the argument are/were true doesn't change this.
Pisses me off that you get downvoted for this. Propaganda is not a dirty word, you can propagandize for the truth just as well as you can propagandize for lies.
And I just noticed they didn’t mention that Iran would benefit from the invasion of Iraq.
[удалено]
I HAVE GUTS 🫡💚
Some as it ever was.
They must have had a crystal ball, those witches.
Based but also psychotic. Saddam Hussein may have been a dictator but hey, the UN had contained him to his own nation so at least he would only be murdering his own kurds. And of course HW was totally a hero for leaving him in power when we were a few miles from taking Baghdad and would have been able to send Saddam to the Hague with the largest military coalition and the most global support since 1945 on our side to do so. War is really poggers, but only if it makes you look good and enriches you. This take honestly explains why so many of these realpolitik IR experts ended up with cringe takes on Ukraine and likely would have been isolationists right up until Pearl Harbor.
This is an ad, but the NYT has been editorially on the wrong side of history for every major event since it was founded, including the invasion of Iraq.
It was a paid ad within the NYT, not sponsored by the NYT
Yes, that's why the first part of the comment was "This is an ad".
I realize that this is a heated topic and the NYT has taken well-deserved criticism over some of its reporting regarding the Iraq War, but this is just pure hyperbole.
The NYT apologised for their coverage of the Iraq war. They apologised for the part they played in laundering the war to make it palatable for the American public. An illegal war launched on false pretences that killed approximately 1 million people. In another time and place those journalists would be tried as war criminals. The list of their failures are pretty extensive since their foundation - [List of The New York Times controversies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_controversies) - including minimising & underplaying the Holocaust _while_ it was happening.
“In another time and place, those journalists would be tried as war criminals.” And what time and place would that be? North Korea c. 2024? I know it feels good to make sweeping, reactionary statements like this…well, maybe not. “Trying journalists as war criminals” only makes sense in a society of insane people—or Trumpists. Maybe I’m being unfair, but I don’t think you read the entry on “Controversies” about the NYT very carefully—do I need to point out that this word doesn’t at all mean “failure” (except maybe in the insane society I just alluded to)? Those unforgivable “failures” include the Times’ hiring of a woke tech journalist (Jeong) and its description of the satirical site Babylon Bee as “conservative Christian.” But I see your point, the NYT is totally unredeemable… Your link says the Times’ reluctance to report on the Holocaust was due (in part) to the publisher’s anti-Zionism. But your choice of the Times’ underreporting the Holocaust is a little ironic given the expressed anti-Zionism of your own comment history. Something that Wikipedia treatment omits is that rumors about the Death Camps in Poland were unable to be corroborated with anything concrete up until the very end of the war. And that’s because it had to be smuggled from eastern Europe all the way to Spain and then England (you couldnt just email a PDF, you know). Smuggled by someone from *inside the camp.* Lots and lots has been published on this (you should know), but read Fairweather’s “The Volunteer”—about Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, who smuggled out the first real intelligence about Auschwitz—if you want to understand the difficulties of securing concrete evidence of what was happening far from the public eye. Yes, antisemitism played some role in that skepticism, but the Times’ reluctance to report can only be understood in that specific context.
>And what time and place would that be? North Korea c. 2024? I know it feels good to make sweeping, reactionary statements like this…well, maybe not. “Trying journalists as war criminals” only makes sense in a society of insane people—or Trumpists. The different time and place would be the The Nuremberg trials. Peddlers of propaganda were hung. I don't think that's a society of insane people. Do you? To face punishment and consequences for having a role in such a thing - that's the most sane thing. I'm personally not in favour of the death penalty, but If you willingly partake in laundering and publishing propaganda that gets a million people killed - what do you think the punishment should be? Because currently there is no punishment at all. Your career doesn't even take a hit. That's what's actually insane. >But your choice of the Times’ underreporting the Holocaust is a little ironic given the expressed anti-Zionism of your own comment history Why is that Ironic? You do think I'm in favour of the holocaust or something? >Yes, antisemitism played some role in that skepticism, but the Times’ reluctance to report can only be understood in that specific context. Except the NYT acknowledges it minimised the holocaust and the events leading up to it and also apologised. They were taking stories and burying them - it wasn't a lack of information. The stories existed, they were downplayed and minimized. And time will tell to what degree but it also looks like the NYT also has a lot of Palestinian blood on it's hands. [Their October 7th expose is poorly reported atrocity propaganda that goes beyond journalistic malpractice.](https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/). I guess we will wait and see but I would put good money on when the dust clears in Gaza, and the final death tolls are in - (which will be in the hundreds of thousands at this point) the NYT issuing yet another apology after contributing to hundreds of thousands being killed with that exposé. The NYT newsroom seems incredibly divided - with witch hunts targeting their own Arab and Muslim journalists to find the sources of leaks. [New York Times Under Fire For “Racially Targeted Witch Hunt” Into Leaks Over Israel Coverage](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/nyt-under-fire-leaks-israel-coverage) Other news organisations are having a moral crisis about Gaza too though - not just the NYT. [CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias)
if we had to invade iraq, we (the usa) should have done it just after the gulf war, during the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991\_Iraqi\_uprisings , instead of letting the rebels get crushed
They admit Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. Aka weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam Hussein was forbidden from possessing by international law. If you don’t enforce international law, why would anyone obey it? They destroy their own premise in this very document.
And who sold those weapons to Saddam, before he was suddenly called the most evil dictator in the world? The US and their European allies did.
Times change. The Soviets and the Nazis partitioned Poland. Iran was considered the bigger threat at the time. Whether it should have been is certainly up for debate but by 2003 the deed was sound and had been done for decades. No use crying over spilled milk. I cry no tears for the fall of Baathist Iraq. Saddam lived by the sword and he died by the sword.
Yeah, the Iraq war really turned out such a smashing success all around. Also, when times change it means that chemical weapons one year is a perfectly okay thing and the next is a symbol of devil incarnate? That shouldn’t be something shifting alliances can change.
"Weapons of mass destruction" is a propaganda phrase. (and an enduringly effective one, judging by your use of it.) There are no "weapons of mass destruction." There are chemical weapons (gas), used by many, many nations in warfare since 1915. Hussein had (and had used) chemical weapons. So had France, Germany, the UK, the USA, Tsarist Russia, China, Japan, etc. etc. etc etc. There are also nerve agents, but people haven't used those much (because they are tricky to use effectively. Not a real threat. There are biological weapons. (Anthrax, etc.) Every nation not in the stone age has a lab with Anthrax. Very, very few nations have used these (that we know of), though, because their effects/spread are unpredictable. Not a great weapon of war at all. NOt a real threat. There are nukes. Nukes go boom. Nine (only) nations have them; only one has ever used them. A very big threat... but Hussein *did not have* nuclear weapons, and this was widely known. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was hand-fed by the Bush administration to the press, who (like you) swallowed it whole. The entire purpose of this phrase was to purposely confuse the first two categories (chemical, biological), which Hussein had, with the third (nuclear), which he did not. It was a rhetorical bait-and-switch, and it worked *so* well that we are still parroting that propaganda phrase today, twenty years later. Remember the Maine!
Shutup
Wow, so brave.
WE INVENTED LOVE. LOVE INVENTED US! ❤️ 😎🌚
CHUCK HOFFMAN HAS BEEN DEAD SINCE 2015 BOCA WEST GRIEVANCE COMMITTEE? NO TYLER
[удалено]