Words like this are fun for schoolkids but don’t say anything at all about what was actually done. It’s an effort to take something phenomenally complex and reduce it to a slogan. Slogans are good for fostering outrage, but not much else, and they distract attention from detail. Leave slogans to politics, not history.
I’m not commenting on the legality or appropriateness or intelligence of either invasion, but on the nature of the goals behind them.
One was an attempt at forcing a regime change, the other was an attempt at regime elimination and annexation of territory.
Both can and should be criticized, but not for being the same thing. They weren’t.
Could we call them different flavours of imperialism, though?
Words like this are fun for schoolkids but don’t say anything at all about what was actually done. It’s an effort to take something phenomenally complex and reduce it to a slogan. Slogans are good for fostering outrage, but not much else, and they distract attention from detail. Leave slogans to politics, not history.