[pasabagi]

You know how you can tell you have a good propaganda machine? It's when you launch a war, your poll ratings shoot up. When you kill loads of people in your war, it doesn't come out in the newspapers, it comes out in the Lancet, two years after all the depleted-uranium dust has settled.

That's the first gulf war.

In comparison, the Ukraine-Russia conflict is honestly the worst war from a propaganda perspective, for the aggressor, in living memory. If you're at the point where you have to eradicate independent media just to stem the bleeding from every somewhat-honest person's first impression of what you've done, you've completely lost control of the narrative.

Obviously, it is a war of aggression, but that's true of a lot of wars in my lifetime. Rarely has a war of aggression in modern times raised so much opprobrium, and the basic reason for this is the absolutely puny soft power of Russia.

[wahern]

Almost all of the 50-100,000 civilians killed as a consequence of the Gulf War were killed by Saddam Hussein putting down an insurgency. (Direct civilian losses by the hands of the invading force were less than 4,000.) That the U.S. gave the impression they would support an insurgency and then left those people to be slaughtered by Hussein became a not insignificant piece of moral propaganda used by Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi (leader of the pseudo-government in exile), and others to justify the Iraq War.

IOW, the talking point that those deaths were the fault of the U.S. invasion was ultimately used to have another go, resulting in even more deaths. We should be really careful about making moral equivalencies. Yes, in a very real sense the Gulf War was a but-for cause, and being mindful of how such campaigns can upset regional stability to the detriment (in absolute terms) of civilian life is important, but that's definitely not the same thing as having killed those people directly.

EDIT: If you were referring to the carcinogenic effects of depleted uranium, the evidence has been extremely equivocal even to this day. Unsurprising given the insane confounders, such as all the other unchecked chemicals used in the environment in such areas, not to mention the after effects of actual physical violence of a particular war, as well as ongoing violence populations typically suffer under autocratic regimes (including actual chemical weapons repeatedly deployed by Hussein). Plus there's the general anti-nuclear hysteria one must account for, which creates a selection bias in whom and what is studied by those with an axe to grind. All of which is to suggest a very small epidemiological effect at best. In violence ravaged areas the least of anybody's worries, and certainly nothing that could even remotely rise to the same level of concern as unleashing a military on a population, using any kind of weaponry. Anybody seriously concerned about depleted uranium in Iraq should probably steer clear of Ukrainian agricultural products for quite awhile given the nasty chemicals being currently dispersed across Ukrainian fields from weaponry and fires. But we both know that's a mostly irrational (i.e. disproportionate) concern even if theoretically plausible.

[pasabagi]

> (Direct civilian losses by the hands of the invading force were less than 4,000.)

I can see that, in terms of direct civilian losses, the first gulf war was mild. However, I don't think it's in any way reasonable to only count direct deaths in a war that was devastating to civilian infrastructure.

While the effect of the war itself was muddied by the sanctions regime (which killed an enormous number of people), bombing civilian infrastructure obviously has a negative effect on civilian life expectancy. Academic treatments tend to push the numbers a lot higher (hundreds of thousands) due to the increases in child mortality, excess deaths, etc in post-war Iraq.

As for the DUP stuff, I don't have any particularly complex opinion. It seems somewhat obvious to me that heavy metals are typically poisonous, alpha-particle emitters are extremely poisonous, so my tendency would be to assume that spraying depleted uranium about is going to cause negative health outcomes, probably including cancer.

Personally, I think there is some merit to the idea of the first gulf war as a well-executed war, and if I was living in Iraq, I would probably rather live through that war than the 2003 invasion, or any number of other wars in the 20th century.

That said, if you compare two similar wars in terms of direct civilian casualty counts (Gulf war (3,664), Russo-Ukrainian war (3,393 so far)), the narrative could not be more different.

What's interesting about the first gulf war to me is not really the casualty counts (fairly typical, on all scales, to conflicts of a similar duration and intensity) but rather the success of the new model (embedded reporters, 24/7 news coverage) in controlling the media narrative.