I think a material difference between Iraq (v2 anyway) and Ukraine is that they can keep doing the "well Russia was the aggressor" thing indefinitely even if the reality is more complicated.
also yes obviously some libs are still stubborn about Iraq, the worst ones, but for the most part its generally agreed that the Iraq War was a bad thing.
when they have a collective realization it usually comes long after it stops mattering (like denouncing the coup in Chile that happened 50 years ago)
The collective realization happened with Iraq before the war was over at least. But yeah there's a lot of differences that mean that I dont think thatll happen here.
I feel like that realization had more to do with the part where it just kept going even after the whole overthrowing Saddam bit by a lot. Especially after all the reasons given for going in were one by one shown to be wrong from the jump. Even with all that, I think the libs were more embarrassed about how much money was used in "nation building" while the US economy tanked. And not so much for the reasons that we constantly hear from them about "cost of human lives" or whatever pretend moral shit. I think most of them would still resort to adding something to the effect of "well even if we were lied to, it was still worth getting rid of Saddam" after front loading how they were lied to.
So this time the big "gotcha" bit of smugness will still be about how "evil Russia has always been". So it will be still considered America helping "protect freedom" is the "correct" and "moral" choice (even with the price tag that would never be treated as "sooo important" for helping poor US citizens at home). Hell, they still like to call the FSB the KGB. So real "lessons" will not matter outside the same talk but no actions shit they do every single time. They did all kinds of talking nice words for BLM protests (not the org), but their actions were to paint anyone that wasn't "correctly protesting" as bad and over-funded the pigs more. And the cycle continues.
I dont hear this very often from libs. Usually they say getting into Iraq at all was a bad idea altogether. But thats just my experience.
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I really think a lot of that realization is due to the financial collapse of 2007-08 where a shit ton of people started pointing out how horrible the USA is.
Sadly that all seemed to die down when Obama hired that ferry guy to male him some low effort campaign posters that everyone wet their pants over.