Comment by reissbaker
3 days ago
It worked out poorly for America — we got stuck in a long expensive war that we got basically nothing from — but for the average Iraqi? I'd much rather be an Iraqi citizen than an Iranian one, and that wouldn't have been true in the 90s. Saddam was pretty evil — and a bad leader. Iraq's GDP per capita is 6x higher today than it was in 2002, a year before the invasion.
It worked out pretty poorly for the average Iraqi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed (some estimates put it at around 1 million), and millions of people became refugees.
Citing the relative GDP per capita number is reductive and doesn’t give a good picture of the average person’s life.
The GDP should be banned as a metric for being a life quality proxy, it's insane how so many people still refer to it although proven to neglect so many parts of what counts into LQ. To OP: Go check out Doughnut Economics - the book does a good job clearing up economical fallacies & mismodelling of such things.
The whole mess led to ISIS and they claim victims in multiple countries.
This is a pretty wild counter-factual. Reminds me of a report I saw about a hipster cafe existing in Baghdad 2025 as proof of success of the US invasion. What would the alternative have been? How do you factor in the loss of life? I suppose the real answer is asking Iraqis...