alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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ks2048 • last Friday at 1:05 AM
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...
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.