[lump in the melting pot]

Interesting perspective on the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, from someone who had a front-row seat.

[nwrep]

Sorry, I cared about this 20 years ago, but don’t any more. This was a mistake, and it made the conservatives take their eyes off the ideological battleground inside the US at the crucial moment when liberals were ramping up their institutional infiltration.

[PGR88]

I remain optimistic that one day, I will be able to travel back to my old neighborhood. To go back to my old home.

He never explains why he can't travel back home after so many years.

[circlecity]

If I knew then what I know today about the deep state and the utter corruption of the US government I would not have supported this.

[Zhang Fei]

You have to be impressed at the resilience of Saddam’s regime in the face of external, then internal attack. It morphed into al Qaeda for recruitment purposes, and is still populated with many of Saddam’s senior people. (Izzat Ibrahim al Douri survived until 2020, when he was killed in an Iraqi government operation). 4 of Saddam’s key people remain at large 20 years after the invasion was mounted, likely at the head of AQI.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-wanted_Iraqi_playing_cards#List_of_cards

However, it has to be said that one big difference between the Iraqi occupation and the post-WWII occupation is the way the regime’s soldiers had died by the millions in Germany’s and Japan’s cases, and only by the tens of thousands in Iraq’s case. That is the politically-incorrect reason for why the insurgency stayed alive for so long in Iraq, and isn’t completely extinguished. Unlike in Germany and Japan, Iraq’s dead-enders were mostly still alive. And when the political rationale for an invasion is in part to liberate the population, you can’t exactly exterminate the army on the way in.

Another politically incorrect bit of information? The aftermath of the Korean War might have been fairly peaceful for one key reason. During the war, a hundred thousand suspected communists and communist sympathizers were summarily killed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre

This foreshadowed a similar mass killing a decade later in Indonesia that followed a Communist insurrection that kicked off with the assassination of 6 generals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_September_Movement

The counter revolution and massacres to follow, immortalized in a Mel Gibson movie, killed 500,000 suspected communists and sympathizers in months. That was the end of the communist movement in Indonesia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366