The actual reports discuss a range that’s unbelievably wide in terms of civilian casualties. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 to 1,000,000 which seems incredibly broad. The US did not deliberately engineer the situation in Iraq of course, and the insurgency, Sunni/Shea civil war that happened as well as Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters made the situation unmanageable.
I think the testimony of so many Uyghur people about this and the huge “re-education” holiday camps you mentioned I’m not sure the West is fabricating such things. There’s simply too much evidence the other way.
It doesn’t really matter whether the US planned to kill slightly fewer people. Everything that ensued was their fault; it wouldn’t happen without US invasion.
Also, note that those numbers are only the direct victims. How many people died because of US sanctions?
As for Uyghurs - I’m sure there were a lot of horrible crimes there. It’s unavoidable when doing things at that scale, in a country which still has a long way to go about human rights. The propaganda part is 1. claiming this is a “genocide”, as in something deliberate, rather than crimes committed by individuals, and 2. claiming it’s somehow worse than the US solution to the same problem, which is killing those people on the spot.
What proportion of those actually committing the murders, insurgency, civil war and Islamic jihad should those pointing the gun take? I think it makes all of this far simpler if you just say it’s all America’s fault but it’s clearly more complicated than you’re suggesting.
You must not understand that Iraq was like North Korea before the war, I suggest you read Christopher Hitchens on this as he puts how dark and evil Saddam’s regime was into some light.
You’re arguing both ways in your comments by the way, you say on the one hand America is responsible for all deaths perpetuated even by others because it created the situation for it to happen but when confronted with evil by the Chinese state you make out that individuals did it and it wasn’t intentional by the CCP. I think you have to understand if you lock up 3 million people without trial you’re going to be running a completely unmanageable version of the Stanford prison experiment and cause horrendous unjust suffering. This wasn’t guaranteed in Iraq if we’d have understood the country had such serious internal divisions when we went it.
Iraq was not at all like North Korea, but let’s for a moment assume it was. Let’s say the US attacked NK and it resulted in a million deaths. Would you claim it’s not US fault, because while they started the killing, some of the dead were killed by the defenders?
As for “both ways” - there is a fundamental difference between government sending people with an explicit mission of killing people - which is what US did in Iraq - and the government sending people to doing something else entirely, yet ending with some of the victims dead.
Let’s assume your numbers are right, and the number of incarcerated Uyghurs really is as high as the number of incarcerated Americans: is that genocide, in both cases? Would you say it would be better for those people to get killed instead?
