The US invasion of Iraq is not a moral equivalent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is no legal equivalence too. The US invaded Iraq on March 20th, 2003 from Kuwait.
The US invaded to stop Saddam. Saddam was a deeply evil man who gassed the Kurds living in his nation, tortured his Shia citizens, invaded his Kuwaiti neighbor, and bragged about having a nuclear weapon program. So the US gathered a coalition of nations, received the blessing of the United Nations, allied with Saudi Arabia, and overthrew Saddam, turning him over to his own people who tried and hanged him.
Putin invaded Ukraine so he can take the land and use it to form a buffer around his country. Ukraine on it’s part didn’t incite the war with a completely illegal predatory invasion of a neighboring country to seize it’s resources. Meanwhile, it is the plot of Iraq that brought about the original cause of the US war with Iraq that eventually lead to the invasion that eliminated Saddam Hussein’s regime.
It was known that Saddam Hussein was a war criminal (gassing the Kurds) and was prone to waging wars of aggression (Kuwait, Iran). Saddam Hussein painted himself as an evil dictator who gives reasons US and coalitions to eliminate him.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has never invaded a neighbouring country and was not commiting crimes against its own civilians. This means that painting Ukrainian government as criminals which need to be removed by force can be done only on imperial pretense.
If Ukraine was like Iraq, they would have tried to conquer Moldova and tried to exterminate or expel their Roma minority. Clearly, this never happened.
During Saddam Hussein’s reign, over 1 million people “disappeared” and he tried to commit genocide on the Kurds, practically using chemical weapons against his population.Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government and the UN both sanctioned the First Gulf War. But it was a coalition of mostly Arab countries that did much of the driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Sadaam Hussein would continue his pernicious activities and the US again formed a coalition and got UN authority to depose Sadaam Hussein, though some of the evidence for the second Gulf War was suspect. It was a legal move for U.S.
Russia has conducted no less than FIVE invasions of its neighbors, all without provocation. These include Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, and the Ukraine (twice.) There was no coalition. There was no UN approval. There was no provocation, just military adventurism practices on smaller countries with no chance of resisting.
