Ukraine vs Iraq: Comparing Russia's domestic reaction to an unjustified invasion to America's domestic reaction to an unjustified invasion
We desperately need the Yellow Ribbon position
This post is intended to compare and contrast the domestic reactions to the Iraq War and the Ukraine War in the United States and Russia, respectively. Before I can dive into that, I need to get some clarifying statements out of the way.
These two wars are not the same and should not be treated identically. The U.S. invasion of Iraq did not have the same types of intentions, and it was not launched against a neighbor that had extremely close ties to the U.S., like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Hussein regime was significantly worse than the government of Ukraine at the time of invasion and comparing them is fruitless; Saddam Hussein and his underlings are definitively worse than Zelensky and the Ukrainian government. The type of attritional warfare, along with mass bombardment via rockets and artillery, that we are seeing in Ukraine is very different from what the U.S. fought in Iraq, and the consequences for comparing the domestic reactions to the wars should keep that in mind. We won’t be able to tell how the violations of human rights, violations of international treaties governing acceptable combat, and atrocities committed by the sides in both conflicts can stack up against one another until the Ukrainian war is over, though I am fairly confident that U.S. troops never committed more than just a fraction of the crimes that Russian troops already have. To be very blunt about it - Russia’s war against Ukraine is an unjustified invasion by an undemocratic government that has resulted in the unnecessary death of tens of thousands of people, including many civilians, and the pain and suffering caused by Putin’s bloody regime need to be stopped as soon as possible and annexed territories should be negotiated to return back to Ukraine.
With that said, this is not whataboutism. It is entirely legitimate to make comparisons between two countries that both launched unjustified invasions of sovereign nations. My interest is not in trying to excuse Russia or make Putin’s government seem more benign than it is by washing its crimes against Ukraine through pointing at every mistake the U.S. has made with Iraq. My interest is in comparing the actions and opinions of American society with those of Russian society in response to their governments’ choice to launch these wars.
Let’s start here: the United States may be flawed, but it is a democracy. The government of the U.S. at the time of the invasion of Iraq was democratically elected. You can claim that Bush won the presidential election of 2000 unfairly, but the official system step up in the country worked as intended and the will of the people was very much represented. You can argue that because the invasion was not an official declaration of war via an Act of Congress, and so it circumvented the mechanisms that are intended to translate popular opinion into wartime actions, but Congress did pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.
While both the Russian and American governments worked to drive public support behind their respective invasions, the big difference between the two is that the Russian government has absolutely no claim to represent popular will. Putin’s government is an authoritarian one that fakes its elections. There is no possibility of true representation or the feedback loops that should be found in a democracy. The U.S. has that feedback mechanism and, as we saw in future elections, the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War was represented in candidate positions and voting patterns.
Putin’s government represses any dissent by mass arrests when protests do erupt, pin-point cases against people who post online expressing their antiwar opinions as well as against prominent public figures who remained in Russia, labeling nonconforming media institutions and speakers as “foreign agents” and requiring them to disclose this fact when speaking publicly, all of which creates the kinds of push conditions that have already driven thousands of Russians to flee their home and emigrate to any country that will accept them. The American government and those in power who supported the invasion of Iraq undoubtedly engaged in a kind of cancel culture against dissenting opinions. Who can forget the Dixie Chicks? But there was no government crackdown on dissent in the same vein because the U.S. has a constitutionally protected right to free speech. Public protests were common, regular, and well-attended. No one was afraid of being beaten by riot police because of their choice to participate in an antiwar rally. No one was arrested and charged with “discrediting the armed forces.” There were no legal ramifications for being against the war.
There were, however, social ramifications. The 9/11 terrorist attack created a massive wave of patriotic rally-’round-the-flag style opinions in the general public, and the reason the Dixie Chicks faced the backlash they did is because they were a part of the right-wing, country-music-listening, Republican-leaning American society that switched to singing about Red, White, and Blue in the early 2000s and opposing the war was, to put it mildly, going against the grain. So here’s our first point of comparison; both Russian right-wingers and American right-wingers experienced a strong push towards supporting the government’s invasion, supporting the military in word and in deed, and fighting against antiwar parts of society that they now strongly disagreed with. I am intentionally using the term “right-wing” because diving into the details of who makes up the two groups in either country would be a sociological project of its own, but it’s undeniable that there was some significant (though not overwhelming) portion of both cultures that immediately reacted in a pro-government, pro-war way.
Given enough time, the American right wing movement’s support for the Iraq War started to decrease. Public intellectuals who had previously written op eds in all the most prominent media publications changed their opinions, politicians who voted for the Resolution mentioned above and supported the war changed their tune and tried to dodge responsibility for their prior positions, and, most importantly, the voting public, which drove those changes in tune from politicians, started to come away with the impression that they were lied to about weapons of mass destruction, and started to feel that the post-9/11 fever that gripped them was cynically used by the powers that be to launch an unnecessary and unjustified war that cost their country more than what they were willing to pay.
I am certain that, given enough time, Russia’s right wing movement (whatever exists of it, at least) will start to shift its perspective on the war as well. It’s tough to know how that will happen, particularly since the outcome of the war will drastically impact this evolution. We can easily imagine everything from full on revanchism driving towards a second war to a complete abandonment of the Putin regime and its stated goals with Ukraine. Whatever does happen, though, will be happening with the limits on dissenting speech that the Russian government imposes on both the political left and political right. After all, if the prowar movement in Russia isn’t under Kremlin control, does the Kremlin want it?
The political left reacted similarly in both cases as well. While “I’m moving to Canada” is more of a joke than anything resembling a true trend, it’s obvious that antiwar Americans felt uncomfortable showing themselves as Americans in the wake of the invasion. After all, the majority of the world disagreed with the actions of the U.S. government. Putting a Canadian pin on your backpack as you travel around Europe after graduating college is not just something Lisa Simpson did. While this essay isn’t intended to compare how the international community has treated antiwar Americans and antiwar Russians, it’s undeniable that there’s a strong desire to separate oneself from one’s country that can be found on the political, antiwar left. Sometimes it’s a simple denouncement of the war, sometimes a denouncement of the government, sometimes a complete refusal to acknowledge oneself as being American or Russian.
The more radical the antiwar position, the less traction it receives with the general public. Denying your own Russianness as a result of Putin’s invasion is not a popular take, to put it mildly. Even strongly antiwar Russians are coming to the correct conclusion that, while the war may have been started by the Russian government, it is not representative of the will of the Russian people and is directly in opposition to the interests of the Russian nation. Becoming a global exile while getting thousands of your men killed on the frontlines of a pointless war is not going to make the lives of everyday Russians any better nor the prospects of a happier future any brighter.
While I think it would be worthwhile to dig into the similarities between the Russian and American left-wing’s antiwar movements, I also don’t think it would be very fruitful. They’re simply very similar. There’s a connection between higher education levels equating to lower level of support. There’s a connection between artists, musicians, and comedians expressing antiwar opinions. There’s a lot of connections, but there’s one big difference - opposing the Iraq War publicly in the U.S. can have social consequences, but never legal consequences, while opposing the Ukraine War publicly in Russia has consequences of the most extreme nature, including death.
The true meat of the comparison between these two cases lies in the middle. What does the independent voter think? What does the “average Joe” think about the invasion? How does that opinion change over time, what are the internal contradictions in those opinions, and what actionable consequences follow? We know that polling showed majority support for the invasion of Iraq immediately before and after. We know that the opinion polling showed a shift in support over the next couple of years, ending up in a majority of Americans answering that they opposed the war and thought it was a mistake to begin with.
Russian opinions on the war are essentially impossible to judge accurately. There is no way to properly gauge antiwar sentiments when there are too many negative consequences to speaking out against the war. An atmosphere of “shut up and keep your head down” yields polling nonresponses, leaving the floor open to vocal support for the war to sounds louder than it has a right to be. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t support for the war, and we can estimate certain percentages based on what we have available. I recently listened to a discussion on this topic by Open Democracy, which has published a detailed analysis of the issue of polling for support. I am comfortable saying that a solid third of the actively politically engaged public in Russia supports the war. As the Open Democracy piece breaks it down, there are different types of “support” based on what angle the respondents chose to focus on. The failure of the Russian government to create a cohesive narrative behind why the invasion happened in the first place leaves the floor open to personal interpretations, and as Greg Yudin points out in his Twitter thread linked above, the depoliticization of Russian society drives normal Russians away from having any opinion on big events whatsoever, which means that one person’s “support” can be drastically different from another person’s “support.”
This brings me to my most important point in this comparison. Americans came to a broadly accepted conclusion that they can support their troops without supporting the war in Iraq. This “support our troops” narrative was ubiquitous after a certain point post-invasion, as was the associated yellow ribbon. As I remember it, yellow ribbons were everywhere. I saw them pinned to electrical poles out in the country, I saw them as bumper stickers on cars, I saw them as flags hanging from flagpoles right underneath the American flag. They were in public schools, churches, and stores. They were everywhere.
A yellow ribbon meant that a person definitely supported U.S. troops, but did not necessarily mean that they supported the invasion or the ongoing occupation of Iraq. There was a separation between “our boys overseas” and the political decisions coming out of Washington D.C. that was driven by America’s difficult history dealing with the Vietnam War. American soldiers, including men who were victims of the draft, were often denounced as participants in the crime of the U.S. government against Vietnam by the antiwar movement of the time, which left a strongly negative impression on American society. When Americans in the 2000s reflected on the Vietnam War, they generally saw the war as a mistake, but did not want to see U.S. soldiers as wartime criminals, unless they were participants in actual war crimes. It was very common for a conversation between Americans with differing opinions on the Iraq War to arrive at the conclusion that you can be against the war itself without having to be nasty or mean to American troops. After all, they’re just doing their duty. Someone has to, right? If the U.S. faced a military threat that we would all agree has to be defended against, like an outright invasion, it would be the same men and women in uniform defending us as the ones currently serving in Iraq.
I think this is the right conclusion for a reasonable citizen to make. As a citizen of both the U.S. and the Russian Federation, it’s certainly my position on both the Iraq War and the Ukraine War. Both governments used false pretenses to launch completely unjustified invasions of sovereign states. Both governments sent its citizens, people who could easily be my neighbors or coworkers, to go kill and be killed in a different country for some vague goal that had nothing to do with the prosperity of the country. The majority of the soldiers, particularly in Russia’s case (and America’s with Vietnam, but no so much with Iraq) are not there because they’re bloodthirsty monsters who want to murder, but regular people who happen to serve in the miliary and who have to follow orders given by their commanders. That’s how the military should work. The issue isn’t that soldiers are following orders, it’s that the orders are for them to cross the border of another state and shoot at people that haven’t attacked us.
(Since folks have a hard time with reading comprehension and have an easy time forgetting what they’ve just read, if the soldiers commit war crimes of any kind, they should be denounced and held legally responsible for their actions. There is no excuse for war crimes, orders or no orders.)
Applying this American standard to Russia immediately reveals the double standards between the two cases. Few Americans who are up-in-arms over Russia’s neofascist state would apply the same standard to the U.S. during the Iraq War. When Russian school children are told to draw postcards to be sent to soldiers on the front, it’s a disgusting indoctrination of children into an evil imperialist culture that should be destroyed. When American school children did the same thing (and I remember this personally), no such conclusions about indoctrination or imperialist culture were drawn by anyone other than the fringe left. Credit to fringe lefties, if they’ve managed to stick to their values through both wars.
Antiwar Americans would have never been forgiven if they tried to donate money to Iraqis fighting against U.S. troops. There are many antiwar Russians who have already done so and who now face very serious consequences for doing exactly that. There are a lot of antiwar public figures (who are no longer in Russia) that call for domestic terrorism against the Putin regime, monetary donations to Ukraine’s armed forces, and who openly advocate for Russia to lose the war outright, even for Russia to disintegrate as a country. Now, I disagree with these people. I do not think that giving money to a government who will use that money to kill citizens of your country is morally appropriate. I also think that the level of antiwar positions in Russia is significantly higher than it was in the U.S. during the Iraq War. How many Americans used bombs to kill prowar propagandists or killed military recruiters or firebombed recruitment centers? More importantly, how many Americans would have found ways to excuse those actions as necessary for the antiwar movement? How much support would that have received internationally?
Thankfully the cases linked above are outliers and the majority of Russia’s antiwar population simply tries to live their lives as best they can while doing what they can to negate the consequences the war forces upon them. Hundreds of thousands have already fled the country, but many are unable to afford such a move due to the basic circumstances of life. How many Americans moved to Canada during the Iraq War? Russia’s antiwar sentiments have a higher pitch to them, and the outlier cases are more extreme as a result. I would also put antiwar opinions in Russia somewhere around a third of the politically active population. Some members of that group are more vocal or active, some are more reserved, but considering their circumstances in comparison to the U.S., every single person who holds such opinions is taking on a massive risk.
Those who oppose the war, but are not extremists face an impossible choice. The standard of “support the troops, oppose the war” doesn’t exist as an option. For the Kremlin, support for the troops is meaningless and opposition to the war is an existential risk. People who try to walk that fine line are lumped in with those who have already derussified themselves. For Ukraine, anything short of strapping on a vest full of dynamite and storming Putin’s bunker isn’t enough action from Russians. It’s hard to blame them for such opinions, and I cannot say I wouldn’t also think such things if I was in their place. For the international antiwar community, it seems like deferring to Ukrainian opinions is the go-to strategy, since we have already seen many European countries denying entry to Russians who are fleeing the mobilization.
What’s left is a completely missing, but desperately needed middle ground in Russia. A middle ground that offers a denouncement of the invasion, but a support for regular military servicemembers, particularly those who have been mobilized. A middle ground that argues against the war from a pro-Russian position, rather than a pro-Ukrainian one, and tries to offer the Russian public a way out of an inescapable situation; a way to stay Russian and love your country without having to support a suicidal war. We’re missing the Yellow Ribbon position. We need to “bring our troops home.”
It is impossible to imagine a U.S. politician running on an antiwar platform who failed to pin the American flag on his or her lapel or who demanded that Americans reflect on their chauvinist ways. As we saw with the growing disappointment with the Iraq War, Americans came to see the invasion as a mistake on their own and flocked to politicians, including Barack Obama himself, who took the reasonable position of withdrawing from Iraq. Obama succeeded specifically because he refused to be anti-American while also being antiwar. Perhaps you think that Americans should have reflected on their imperialistic culture, but you have to square your want with the wants of the majority of Americans who never gave up their patriotic pride while also coming to terms with the fact that the invasion was a massive mistake.
The instinct that drives Russians to collect money to buy socks and medical equipment for their underequipped solders on the front is a good instinct. This is the type of grassroots, horizontal connection that you would hope to find in a health society. This is the same instinct that gets people to help victims of a natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake, and its’ extremely important that we don’t suffocate that seedling of hope in Russian society by equating support for the troops with support for the war. They are simply not the same thing. Sending dry socks to soldiers in trenches is not a request for those soldiers to pull the trigger, it’s a request to come home with their feet intact.
As Russian liberals slowly come around to this Yellow Ribbon position, I am afraid that non-Russians fail to see this as the only correct path forward. America would not have been better off if non-Americans required Americans to denounce their country and their culture. The parts of American society that were prowar from the beginning and who stuck to their prowar positions are an inevitability. They would exist in any country that went to war, and we see that minority in Russia right now. Antiwar sectors of society are similarly inevitable, and the more extreme their position, the less relevant they are to actually stopping the war. The average American went in to the invasion of Iraq with post-9/11 blood in their eyes. They took some time, they heard some arguments, they saw the consequences, and they cooled off. Would they have had that opportunity if there was no Yellow Ribbon position to take? If they were forced between a rock and a hard place, if their choices were either “support the war entirely” or “abandon your country and identity,” would they have been able to change their minds?
These questions are important because, as I see it, they offer the only legitimate way forward. Antiwar Russians can never be successful in selling their message to the broader Russian public without coming to this perfectly reasonable compromise. Prowar Russians unfortunately hold the higher ground when it comes to patriotism, and need to be undermined to take that high ground away. I am hesitant to offer any advice to Ukrainians during this difficult time, but all other non-Russians need to step away from their keyboards and take a look at the situation with a cool head. Was your position on the Iraq War similar to your position to the Ukraine War? How do you see the evolution of America’s public perception of the war? Are you applying the same standards to each case, or do you hold double standards?
This is not the time for hypocrisy. Unlike with the Iraq War, international opinions on the war in Ukraine hold a lot of weight, and making sure that we all draw the right conclusions from similar cases is very important when it comes to setting expectations for how this war ends.