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I was a teenager and not following the news when the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Did it feel this shitty?
This... Feels worse.
Much worse.
Iraq and Afghanistan were not, at the time, nuclear powers.
Iraq had no real allies in the region.
Afghanistan was also relatively isolated.
That's not the case with Lebanon. As proxy for Iran. A friend of Russia. A friend of north Korea. A friend of China.
Iran won't just shoot some rockets.
Demands on how high you were on your own ultra-nationalist supply. I remember hearing the news of the US invasion of Iraq and just thinking "It's Vietnam all over again, fuck."
All the same, I would think there was less a feeling of "we/they are over there to expand our territory and drive the residents out with unbearable bloodshed."
We had an excuse to be over there bombing their cities and butchering their citizens
Didn't you see the video at the UN? Aluminum tubes! That's an existential threat to the United States. We had to invade.
I'm not disagreeing with you: both wars are/were unjustified. I'm speaking more to the difference in intent that's on display. Nobody in the US ever intended to drive all the Iraqi people out, move white Americans in and make it the 51st state. That kind of ethnic cleansing is clearly Israel's intent with Gaza, and seemingly with Lebanon.
De-Ba'athification was intended to remove Iraqis from positions of power. And, to a certain extent, whole populations in the Sunni Triangle were being forced off the most valuable plots of oil producing territory.
Similarly, in Afghanistan, Americans built up these Green Zone territories where native Afghans were not welcome.
We never got to the point where we could just start homesteading enormous tracks of territory for European or American migrants. But that wasn't for lack of trying. It was because civilians weren't desperate enough to try and stake claims in the middle of an active insurgency.
Israel is much smaller than Iraq. And they have a large community of settlers ready to risk their lives for a piece of someone else's land. Even then, it has taken them decades to reach this point.
You can find large American expat communities in Mexico, Japan, Germany, Korea, Honduras and El Salvador... Anywhere we've sent soldiers in the last century really.
The Israelis just happen to be more genocidal than our proxies in Okanawa or Taipei