Russia’s War in Ukraine Is Not the Iraq War

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

 

Senator J. D. Vance and I engaged in a contentious exchange on whatever you’re supposed to call Twitter these days. I don’t intend to rehash those arguments here. I do, however, want to take the opportunity to rebut the senator’s primary claim — one that has been articulated by a number of Republican politicians who cater to anti-Ukraine sentiments on the Right. That is the notion that Russia’s war in Ukraine is in some meaningful way analogous to the U.S.-led coalition’s ouster of Saddam Hussein from Iraq in 2003. At least insofar as the West’s support for Kyiv’s defense is another expression of American hubris that can only worsen conditions in the region. This is just nonsense.

 

As Vance recently told a local media outlet:

 

“In a lot of ways, John, this reminds me of 2003/2004 with Iraq, where everybody seemed to want to rush towards a military conflict. I think, 20 years now, we recognize what a terrible mistake that was. I don’t want us to get 20 years down the road before we realize what a catastrophic mistake we’re making.”

 

Like many of his fellow Republican critics of Ukraine’s cause, Vance relies on calcified narratives around the fallacy of the coalition’s conflict in Iraq to do a lot of work for him. Without the allegory, he would have to devote his efforts to making a cognizable case against the defense of America’s interests and those of its treaty-bound allies in Europe from an act of militaristic expansionism by its historic adversary. It’s not immediately clear how Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine resembles the war in Iraq at all, save the highly literary sense that all human conflict shares some lamentable parallels.

 

Russia launched its second invasion of Ukraine by surprise. It neither cited nor even bothered to manufacture a casus belli. Its primary prosecutor rambled on about the ancient rights to the Black Sea coast secured by the tsars in their campaigns against the Ottoman Turks before attempting the reconquest of Ukraine with the aim of absorbing its territory into the Russian Federation and erasing the distinct culture to which its people subscribe. In this, there are far more contrasts with the Iraq War than similarities.

 

The U.S. and its allies policed the skies over Iraq from 1991 to 2003 following Hussein’s attempt to invade and annex neighboring territory, often encountering resistance from forces loyal to Baghdad. On three occasions before the 2003 invasion, the West was compelled to mount punitive strikes on Iraqi targets in response to its efforts to murder its minority populations and destabilize the region at the expense of American interests. The 2003 invasion was preceded by months of debate culminating in congressional authorization for the war — a legal framework backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution finding Iraq to have been in material breach of its international obligations. All this occurred over the course of many months, throughout which the Hussien regime blocked the work of international inspectors who might have provided proof that the stockpiles of unconventional weapons that were absolutely in Iraq’s possession were not the threat almost every Western intelligence agency made them out to be.

 

This isn’t an apples and oranges comparison. It’s a comparison between apples and typewriters. They’re both carbon-based objects, I suppose, in the same way that all wars are, in fact, wars. But their similarities end there.

 

The comparison is morally fraught in other important ways. The Russians have conducted their campaign in Ukraine similarly to how they conducted intervention in Syria — brutally and with utter disregard for civilian life. It has conducted a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing. It uses rape, summary execution, and child abductions as weapons of war. Practitioners of these crimes face nothing like the threat of justice at home. Indeed, there’s evidence that these acts are encouraged by Kremlin officials.

 

There is no comparison here with the conduct of America’s armed forces, and it’s obscene to draw one (as the senator himself might attest, given his own admirable service in Iraq). To the extent that the U.S. and its soldiers were implicated in criminal misconduct in Iraq, we know that because their activities were uncovered either by investigators or independent media outlets, and the implicated were punished in accordance with the law. The distinction between a country that plans to conduct war crimes and one that suppresses the bestial spirits unleashed by war and punishes those who succumb to their animal instincts isn’t particularly elusive.

 

The most glaring distinction between the Iraq War of 2003 and Russia’s war in Ukraine is that neither the U.S. nor its allies are doing the fighting. This is often brushed aside by those who cling to the parallel as a temporary condition that will disappear when the West is invariably drawn directly into the conflict. Rather, the West’s posture is designed to prevent that outcome. In the absence of American support for Ukraine’s independence, the fighting wouldn’t stop. It would continue, but Ukraine would lose faster, its people would be killed at accelerating rates, and Russia’s aggression would draw ever closer to NATO’s borders.

 

Vance has long maintained that the U.S. could end the war tomorrow if it left Kyiv to its own devices — presumably, leaving its people to make their peace with surrender and subjugation. But America’s allies get a say in that outcome, and we have every reason to expect that Poland, Romania, and the Baltics would be less comfortable with that eventuality. Indeed, they may make their own accommodations with the Russian bear at America’s expense or freelance initiatives designed to secure their borders with Ukraine, or even inside Ukraine, in ways that would threaten to draw the alliance into a broader conflict with Russia. American support for Ukraine’s own defense preempts other efforts by Europeans who retain a living memory of Russian domination to fend for themselves.

 

As a talking point, equating Russia’s war with the Iraq War pings painful emotional centers in the American mind. That’s probably the entirety of the analogy’s value proposition because the parallels don’t hold up amid anything resembling logical scrutiny.