You know you can just paste mermaid into excalidraw?
It has a mermaid WYSIWYG editor and once the diagram is inserted you can edit it, move objects, add text just like you had drawn it directly in excalidraw.
I usually enter mermaid and then move things around to my liking rather than drawing from scratch.
You can also paste csv in, it's been a while since I've done it but I think it even generates a chart.
Author here: I use mermaid lot as well and for some things like process flows, and to model interactions it it outrules excalidraw and posts will follow where i need exactly that. but to visualize things high level i find excalidraw way nicer.
I appreciate performance as much as the next person; but I see this endless battle to measure things in ns/us/ms as performative.
Sure there are 0.000001% edge cases where that MIGHT be the next big bottleneck.
I see the same thing repeated in various front end tooling too. They all claim to be _much_ faster than their counterpart.
9/10 whatever tooling you are using now will be perfectly fine. Example; I use grep a lot in an ad hoc manner on really large files I switch to rg. But that is only in the handful of cases.
Whenever you have this kind of impressions on some development, here are my 2 cents: just think "I'm not the target audience". And that's fine.
The difference between 2ms and 0.2ms might sound unneeded, or even silly to you. But somebody, somewhere, is doing stream processing of TB-sized JSON objects, and they will care. These news are for them.
I remember when I was coming up on the command line and I'd browse the forums at unix.com. Someone would ask how to do a thing and CFAJohnson would come in with a far less readable solution that was more performative (probably replacing calls to external tools with Bash internals, but I didn't know enough then to speak intelligently about it now).
People would say, "Why use this when it's harder to read and only saves N ms?" He'd reply that you'd care about those ms when you had to read a database from 500 remote servers (I'm paraphrasing. He probably had a much better example.)
Turns out, he wrote a book that I later purchased. It appears to have been taken over by a different author, but the first release was all him and I bought it immediately when I recognized the name / unix.com handle. Though it was over my head when I first bought it, I later learned enough to love it. I hope he's on HN and knows that someone loved his posts / book.
Wow that takes me back. I used to lurk on unix.com when I was starting with bash and perl and would see CFAJohnson's terse one-liners all the time. I enjoyed trying my own approaches to compare performance, conciseness and readability - mainly for learning. Some of the awk stuff was quite illuminating in my understanding of how powerful awk could be. I remember trying different approaches to process large files at first with awk and then with Perl. Then we discovered Oracle's external tables which turned out to be clear winner. We have a lot more options now with fantastic performance.
Also as someone who looks at latency charts too much, what happens is a request does a lot in series and any little ms you can knock off adds up. You save 10ms by saving 10 x 1ms. And if you are a proxyish service then you are a 10ms in a chain that might be taking 200 or 300ms. It is like saving money, you have to like cut lots of small expenses to make an impact. (unless you move etc. but once you done that it is small numerous things thay add up)
Also performance improvements on heavy used systems unlocks:
Wait what? I don't get why performance improvement implies reliability and incident improvement.
For example, doing dangerous thing might be faster (no bound checks, weaker consistency guarantee, etc), but it clearly tend to be a reliability regression.
First, if a performance optimization is a reliability regression, it was done wrong. A bounds check is removed because something somewhere else is supposed to already guaratee it won't be violated, not just in a vacuum. If the guarantee stands, removing the extra check makes your program faster and there is no reliability regression whatsoever.
And how does performance improve reliability? Well, a more performant service is harder to overwhelm with a flood of requests.
It does not need to be an explicit check (i.e. a condition checking that your index is not out of bounds). You may structure your code in such a way that it becomes a mathematical impossibility to exceed the bounds. For a dumb trivial example, you have an array of 500 bytes and are accessing it with an 8-bit unsigned index - there's no explicit bounds check, but you can never exceed its bounds, because the index may only be 0-255.
Of course this is a very artificial and almost nonsensical example, but that is how you optimize bounds checks away - you just make it impossible for the bounds to be exceeded through means other than explicitly checking.
Which is fine, but the vast majority of the things that get presented aren’t bothering to benchmark against my use (for a whole lotta mes). They come from someone scratching an itch and solving it for a target audience of one and then extrapolating and bolting on some benchmarks. And at the sizes you’re talking about, how many tooling authors have the computing power on hand to test that?
Well obviously that would happen mostly only on the biggest business scales or maybe academic research; one example from Nvidia, which showcases Apache Spark with GPU acceleration to process "tens of terabytes of JSON data":
Who is the target audience? I truly wonder who will process TB-sized data using jq? Either it's in a database already, in which case you're using the database to process the data, or you're putting it in a database.
Either way, I have really big doubts that there will be ever a significant amount of people who'd choose jq for that.
There was a thread yesterday where a company rewrote a similar JSON processing library in Go because they were spending $100,000s on serving costs using it to filter vast amounts of data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536712
I get the sentiment, but everybody thinks that, and in aggregate, you get death by a thousand paper cuts.
It’s the same sentiment as “Individuals don’t matter, look at how tiny my contribution is.”. Society is made up of individuals, so everybody has to do their part.
> 9/10 whatever tooling you are using now will be perfectly fine.
It is not though. Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting quicker. We have computers that are easily 3–4+ orders of magnitudes faster than what we had 40 years ago, yet everything has somehow gotten slower.
The syntax makes perfect sense when you understand the semantics of the language.
Out of curiosity, have you read the jq manpage? The first 500 words explain more or less the entire language and how it works. Not the syntax or the functions, but what the language itself is/does. The rest follows fairly easily from that.
For better or worse, Claude is my intuitive interface to jq. I don't use it frequently, and before I would have to look up the commands every time, and slowly iterate it down to what I needed.
Maybe look at it from another perspective.
Better performance == less CPU cycles wasted. Consider how many people use jq daily and think about how much energy could be saved by faster implementations.
In times like this where energy is becoming more scarce we should think about things like this.
> Consider how many people use jq daily and think about how much energy could be saved by faster implementations.
Say a number; make a real argument. Don't just wave your hand and say "just imagine how right I could be about this vague notion if we only knew the facts"
Was about to post exactly this... It is impressive engineering wise, but for data and syntax, ease of use or all the great features, I care about that more. Speed isn't that important to me for a lot of these tools.
If I/you was working with JSON of that size where this was important, id say you probably need to stop using JSON! and some other binary or structured format... so long as it has some kinda tooling support.
And further if you are doing important stuff in the CLI needing a big chain of commands, you probably should be programming something to do it anyways...
that's even before we get to the whole JSON isn't really a good data format whatsoever... and there are many better ways. The old ways or the new ways. One day I will get to use my XSLT skills again :D
I absolutely understand what you're saying. It makes complete sense. But I will never, ever shake the sense that software that isn't as fast as possible is offensive, immoral, delinquent -- the result of sloth, lassitude, lack of imagination, and a general hostility toward our noble Art.
"Fast enough" will always bug me. "Still ahead of network latency" will always sound like the dog ate your homework. I understand the perils of premature optimization, but not a refusal to optimize.
I agree for some things, but not for tools or "micro-software" like jq that can get called a LOT in an automated process. Every order of magnitude saved for the latter category can be meaningful.
> I see the same thing repeated in various front end tooling too. They all claim to be _much_ faster than their counterpart.
>
> 9/10 whatever tooling you are using now will be perfectly fine
Are you working in frontend? On non-trivial webapps? Because this is entirely wrong in my experience. Performance issues are the #1 complaint of everyone on the frontend team. Be that in compiling, testing or (to a lesser extend) the actual app.
Worked on front end for years. Rarely ever hear people talking about performance issues. I was among the very few people who knew how to use the dev tools to investigate memory leak or heard of memlab.
Either the team I worked at was horrible, or you are from Google/Meta/Walmart where either everyone is smart or frondend performance is directly related to $$.
Uh, I've worked for a few years as a frontend dev, as in literal frontend dev - at that job my responsibility started at consuming and ended at feeding backend APIs, essentially.
From that I completely agree with your statement - however, you're not addressing the point he makes which kinda makes your statement completely unrelated to his point
99.99% of all performance issues in the frontend are caused by devs doing dumb shit at this point
The frameworks performance benefits are not going to meaningfully impact this issue anymore, hence no matter how performant yours is, that's still going to be their primary complaint across almost all complex rwcs
And the other issue is that we've decided that complex transpiling is the way to go in the frontend (typescript) - without that, all built time issues would magically go away too. But I guess that's another story.
It was a different story back when eg meteorjs was the default, but nowadays they're all fast enough to not be the source of the performance issues
> Now what I'd really want is a jq that's more intuitive and easier to understand
Unfortunately I don’t recall the name, but there was something submitted to HN not too long ago (I think it was still 2026) which was like jq but used JavaScript syntax.
> The vast majority of Linux kernel performance improvement patches probably have way less of a real world impact than this.
unlikely given that the number they are multiplying by every improvement is far higher than "times jq is run in some pipeline". Even 0.1% improvement in kernel is probably far far higher impact than this
Yes it feels like a full time job just to try to keep up. And I’ve been in AI for close to 10 years so I feel like I have to keep up at least a minimum.
An other thing for me is that it has gotten a lot harder for small teams with few ressources, let one person, to release anything that can really compete with anything the big player put out.
Quite a few years back I was working on word2vec models / embeddings. With enough time and limited ressources I was able to, through careful data collection and preparation, produce models that outperformed existing embeddings for our fairly generic data retrieval tasks. You could download from models Facebook (fasttext) or other models available through gensim and other tools, and they were often larger embeddings (eg 1000 vs 300 for mine), but they would really underperform. And when evaluating on general benchmarks, for what existed back then, we were basically equivalent to the best models in English and French, if not a little better at times. Similarly later some colleagues did a new architecture inspired by BeRT after it came out, that outperformed again any existing models we could find.
But these days I feel like there is nothing much I can do in NLP. Even to fine-tune or distillate the larger models, you need a very beefy setup.
It was also about how easy it was to generate great XML.
Because it is complicated and everyone doesn't really agree on how to properly representative an idea or concept, you have to deal with varying output between producers.
I personally love well formed XML, but the std dev is huge.
Things like JSON have a much more tighter std dev.
The best XML I've seen is generated by hashdeep/md5deep. That's how XML should be.
Financial institutions are basically run on XML, but we do a tonne of work with them and my god their "XML" makes you pray and weep for a swift end.
Maybe rather: how easy it was to generate rotten XML. I feel you there.
The XML community, though, embraced the problem of different outputs between different producers, and assumed you'd want to enable interoperability in a Web-sized community where strict patterns to XML were infeasible. Hence all the work on namespaces, validation, transformation, search, and the Semantic Web, so that you could still get stuff done even when communities couldn't agree on their output.
It is wild to see America in 2026, I grew up idolizing it.
But a quote I heard during the election of Pope Leo:-
> “Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: 'Look, until America goes into political decline, there won't be an American pope.' And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don't want America running the world religiously. So, I think there's some truth to that, that we're such a superpower and so dominant, they don't wanna give us, also, control over the church."
Has stuck with me, and I thought it to be a little far fetched. But here we are and I find it hard to deny America is in decline.
I am old enough. Iraq is not perfect today but so much better than it was. Go talk to Iraqis and see for yourself.
It costs us some time, money and lives to get to this point. But Saddam (a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors) staying in power would have been way worse for the wider region.
I think the point being made is that there's wider fallout than just what's directly affected. If you go to Syria and ask Syrians how they feel about the affects on the wider region they might not so readily agree. Or even ask Iraqis in the border region who lived through ISIS rule.
Iraqi path to democracy isn't really that different from everyone else's.
People tend to forget that various extant democracies, including European ones,
mostly didn't precipitate out of thin air by everyone deciding to just be nice to one another. Many now-democratic countries had to fight a war of independence or a civil war, often with involvement of third parties, to get there.
France took about 80 years of violent upheavals from 1789 to 1871 to actually become a democratic republic for good. Germany was even worse. Unification of Italy was a long bloody mess. Poland barely survived the 20th century. Even Swiss direct democracy is an aftermath of a civil war, though in their case, it was a small one.
Democracy isn't an application that people just install and it starts working. It usually takes decades for it to take roots, as people have to slowly abandon the idea that it is just easier to massacre their opponents.
Even the US came to be after a war of independence with a major external factor on their side (the French) and only ended slavery through a nasty civil war.
Iraq isn't really an outlier in that context and Iran wouldn't probably be either.
> a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors
The US sent Saddam the Bell helicopters to gas the Kurds. US military aid increased after that happened.
The war with a neighbor was with Iran - the country the US just attacked, and which the US encouraged Iraq to fight. That's why Rumsfwld was over there shaking Saddam's hand.
Iraq was ruled by a sociopath that used chemical weapons against his own citizens. I didn’t agree with the invasion, but there is no doubt Iraq is better off today than it would have been without U.S. involvement.
That's an absurd statement. No doubt? Saddam would be pushing 90 now, odds are he would be dead anyway and who knows how that chain of events would have gone.
And you frequently fly over to Iraq and explain that to the people there right? They nod in agreement with you. “We had to bomb and occupy your country and kill your citizens just like Saddam did remember? Now you’re better off after our failed occupation left your country. We’ll bomb you anytime; sure it costs us money is and the reason neither of our countries have healthcare but who needs healthcare when you have bombs and propaganda. You’re welcome.”
shrug i developed a hobby of visiting countries that are in the news a lot and meeting the locals and talking about their day to day lives. Iraq, Israel/Palestine, North Korea, Venezuela, Saudi, Russia, etc.
I didnt exactly ask Iraqis that question directly and war certainly wasnt the only bad thing in their lives. e.g. a lot of guys would moan that they want to get married but "cant afford it".
but anyways OP's comment set my bullshit-o-meter spinning so fast i got vertigo.
I agree. The military component was a resounding success. The "de-Baathification" was a disaster and gets lumped into the decapitation of Sadaam's regime.
We'll never know the counterfactual, but it seems likely that the banning from public life everyone with ties to the current government was a large contributor to the collapse of the country and rise of the terrorist groups.
Always convenient to drop bombs and say “it would have been worse”. With absolutely no proof of that. It’s the stupidest American talking point and I despise other Americans who use that propaganda.
In the first gulf war, Bush Sr. refused to occupy the country. He viewed it as too difficult and too expensive. In the second gulf war, Bush Jr. declared victory from the deck of an aircraft carrier, occupied the country, hunted and executed its leader, and then opened the U.S. treasury to deal with the aftermath. Thousands of Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's died. The occupation was long and difficult, but its end was still premature and left a power vacuum that ISIS raged into, causing even more destruction. Perhaps Iraqi's can say they're better off today than under Hussein, but a terrible cost was paid. Most of the blood was Iraqi, but most of the treasure was American.
The financial drain on the U.S. was extreme enough to expose the world's preeminent superpower as being unable to bring the occupation of a somewhat backwards and minor dictatorship to a successful conclusion. Iraq is not a big country, in either population or area, but it was still too much for the U.S. to control, even with willing allies. This failure made the world realize there were severe limits to what the U.S. can do. Sure, it might defeat the military of a middle or even major power, but occupy and control it? Fat chance!
In the days ahead, the U.S. military is going to bomb anything that moves and looks like it might shoot back, as well as a lot of infrastructure and probably a decent number of civilian targets by mistake (or design). Trump has framed this invasion as being directed towards eliminating Iran's nuclear program, so expect a lot of facilities in close proximity to civilians (and many of those civilians) to be vaporized.
If Trump is listening to his generals even slightly, he will not try to occupy the country. He'll declare victory and move on to whatever outrage is next to maintain his "Flood the zone" strategy and keep the Epstein heat from finally catching up with him. If that's all he does, this will be another war like Bush Sr.'s. Expensive, but not ruinously so. U.S. deaths will be in the hundreds and not the thousands. Iran will most likely fall into the hands of another mullah or descend into chaos, becoming a long-term security quagmire that will probably continue to bleed the U.S. for decades to come. Even if democracy does take root in Iran, it likely won't be a democracy that's friendly to the U.S..
If Trump isn't listening to his generals (who reportedly advised against the invasion to begin with), he might try to occupy Iran. Iran has double the population and four times the land area as Iraq. Unlike Bush Jr., Trump has not even tried to stitch together a coalition to share the costs. It's unlikely that many countries would be dumb enough to sign on now. There's no NATO article 5 pretext to drag in other NATO countries. There isn't even a falsified pretext like WMD's to quiet the howling in the UN. Israel isn't the kind of help the U.S. needs because the U.S. pays most of Israel's military bills to begin with. In short, if Iraq strained the U.S.'s finances close to the breaking point, Iran will ruin them completely. There's absolutely no way the U.S. can afford to occupy Iran.
Even if Trump cuts and runs, this war will ensure American's can't afford socialized medicine for another generation.
Not a long time ago, the previous time when USA had bombed Iran, Trump claimed to have destroyed completely anything that Iran could use to make nuclear weapons.
It would be weird (or not?) to contradict himself now by claiming that they were able to make nuclear weapons.
I avoid listening to the current POTUS as it’s hard to make sense of his illogic, but his video said, “ they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland.”
Iranian regime-allied forces were a big part of why Iraq was such a quagmire.
The balance of power in the Middle East is shifting from the Sunni~Shia schism that it once was.
Most of the remaining powers are willing to actually engage in diplomacy with Israel & prefer secular groups to Islamist groups.
There's still personality conflicts, such as the one growing between the heads of Saudi Arabia & the UAE, but the general trend seems to be very promising.
Iraq was a quagmire because the US attacked them for no reason at all other than to further Israel's interests. We have no business in the Middle East. Period.
We went into Iraq because we had to station troops in Saudi Arabia in order to defend them against Iraq, and having US troops in 'the holy land' led to Osama Bin Laden leading to 9-11. People say the two aren't connected but if you learn the context at the time they were, just not in the basic way people want to understand situations.
A part, but not the only part. Factions like AQI and later ISIL/ISIS/IS were ideological enemies to both the US and Iran and its Shia militas. The invasion, regime change, and occupation in Iraq would have caused a mess even with a US-aligned regime in Iran.
Nah, if anything the Islamist groups are biding their time, waiting for the internationally-supported governments to lose the will to carry on before striking.
The governments, yes, but not the general population necessarily. And the governments can't survive without oil revenue and/or external support, so they'll be losing in the long run.
> Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good.
I believe this is the legacy of leaders like Saddam. They build a very messy future for their countries. Whenever such a leader is gone, somebody has to take over power. Dictators tend to concentrate as much power in their hands as possible. Forced removal of such a leader might accelerate and / or destabilize power transition. Which might end up in a very messy scenario.
Absolute power transition worked well with monarchy in the past, cause everybody knew who would be the next guy, there were rules and procedures. With dictatorship often times there are no rules. So power transition might turn into a complete chaos even with a natural death of a dictator.
That, combined with extreme short-termism and unbridled optimism. All three probably having a similar root cause.
And we see this across the board. A canonical one that remains prevalent: "If only people would've come out and voted for Kamala in 2024, we wouldn't be in this mess". But then if you follow the pattern, with the candidate she was and what she would've done, this would've secured an ultra-MAGA victory in 2028 (and likely already by 2026 midterms). One more extreme, more devious, more intelligent from the get-go than the current one. People like to cling to "but you don't know that for sure", which is true, but we do know that with about 90% certainty. Betting on 10% is an awful idea and is indeed what has gotten you to where you're at.
It's the single biggest reason for the huge power shift from the US to China. Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. Pain today for gain over time. Of course there are counterexamples, but by and large this holds.
In this case, sure, many Iranians will be happy for a day - especially overseas. So that's what people focus on. People have entirely lost the ability to think realistically in years. Of course part of this is biological, we're monkeys. But there are many reasons to believe that this ability has greatly declined over the last 50 years, particularly in the West and especially in the US.
> Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences.
I'm not sure that's the case with Xi. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he tries, but as far as I can tell from a distance, his value system produces unwise decisions long-term. 10+ years of Xi have slowed economic growth, produced antagonism diplomatically, I'm not sure that the Belt and Road is currently seen favorably. He hasn't figured out a way for local governments to be solvent without selling property, nor has he resolved the shadow debt. I think his policy of shutting down Shanghai and other zero-Covid polices destroyed the people's confidence in the CCP as steward of economic growth, as it became obvious that the government can just arbitrarily kill your business and imprison you in your own home or Covid center. I think that removing your top military leaders--who are the only ones with any actual combat experience--is helpful for a successful occupation of Taiwan. Certainly what Xi did with Hong Kong made peaceful re-unification with Taiwan very unlikely.
The policies you're naming are still enacted for their expected long-term consequences. That doesn't mean all of them are successful in achieving their goals, sometimes their expectations turn out to be wrong. This can happen with any policy, regardless of whether the goal was short-term of long-term.
If you're talking about the power shift part: Many if not most (including me) believe that slowing of economic growth was inevitable, it simply wasn't a level that could be sustained in the long run. There are plenty of issues in China and plenty of policies that may turn out to have failed - much of it remains to be seen, as again, the goals are long term and we may consider them successful a decade or two from now. But the scientific gap with the rest of the world is widening every day, China is crushing it in that area and the fruits will be reaped. Robotics, every kind of energy, every kind of engineering.
> Certainly what Xi did with Hong Kong made peaceful re-unification with Taiwan very unlikely.
It didn't have an impact. By 2019 the chance was already zero barring black swan events. The chance is still zero barring black swan events.
One would think on HN there would be sophisticated grasp of complex systems than Reddit or what have you, so either there are just as many politically dogmatic/biased people in tech, or political threads are dominated by non-tech users, or what?
Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.
Estimates put the number of people killed due to the American invasion between half a million and a million. Saddam's brutality paled in comparison to the carnage the US invasion caused.
During the years which followed after the invasion, lots did, yes. This is first hand account btw. Now? I'm not sure as the country has mostly stablised.
is the civilian population being gassed in Iraq now? how about a brutal repressive regime backed by a secret police that tortured and disappeared thousands? is Iraq really the same as it was under Saddam?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!
ISIS also broke out of countries like Syria, which nobody messed with until after their civil war and the ISIS takeover. Which is to say that the problem isn’t the Iraq war - but Islam. It’s literally called ISIS - and you blame the US for it?
Everything is linked, Syrian civil War didn't happen out of nowhere.
There was an environment of instability in middle east, some is inherent to these countries, but a big part is because another cointry came in 2003 and decided to make of Irak a failed country by bombing all their infrastructures.
Iraq is not the victim here, my friend. Iraq has willingly implicated itself in multiple wars. Unfortunately for Iraq, it was one war too many. Iraq didn't back down, despite having alternatives. Iraq could've negotiated its way out of a war throughout the entire time, but chose violence instead.
I'm tired of people dunking on the west.
Iraq today is likely a better place to live in than Iraq under Saddam. That's thanks to a painful and costly intervention. Muslims continue messing it up for everybody everywhere, the way they always did, regardless of geography or circumstances, under any pretence and excuse under the sun. West gets blamed for it no matter what. Rinse and repeat. It's getting old.
Well, Iran is majority muslim. If somehow you've concluded that muslims are simply fundamentally violent and incapable of stable governance and that is the reason why the occupation of iraq failed then...
But I personally think that the reasons why you see violent insurgency after a regime change and foreign occupation is a little more universal to humans than specific to islam.
When Saddam Hussein was removed, the result was that basically all Iraqi Christians who hadn't fled were murdered. There are probably as many Iraqi Christians in the EU as there are in Iraq now.
Parts of Iraq are much better off, like Kurdistan. Other parts were utterly devastated by our operations, insurgency, sectarian violence, ISIS, and so on. Some people had religious freedom and now live in areas under theocratic control.
We created Saddam Hussein. He was our foil against Iran. We propped up a war that killed over a million Iraqis and Iranians in the 1980s for no net strategic result.
And why did we want to punish Iran? Because the fundamentalist regime overthrew our puppet (the Shah).
And how did the Shah come to be a dictator, essentially? Because we overthrew the liberal democracy Iran had in 1953 at the behest of the british because Iran had wanted to control their own oil and BP wasn't happy.
Even the fundamentalist regime in Iran is kind of America's fault. Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq in 1978 (IIRC) because when it became clear that Iran was lost, we wanted the fundamentalists to take over instead of the communists because we didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence.
It's also a pretty similar story with Osama bin Laden.
As payback for Soviet support for North Vietnam, we supplied arms to the rebels in Afghanistan after the USSR invaded. Supplying Stinger SAMs to the mujahadeen was particularly devastating and these included Osama bin Laden.
Isn't it weird that all this foreign interference always go badly and all these former puppets somehow end up becoming huge problems for us later? When will we learn, exactly?
It's also worth noting that there was a strong desire in American policy circles to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11. 9/11 and the fake WMD story just became the excuse. For example, in 1998 a bunch of people sent a letter to then President Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq and topple Saddam [1]. Just look at the signatories on that letter and what part they played in the War on Terror.
It's because we do these things not for American interests, but for the interests of a small country that has captured our political establishment through campaign finance and blackmail.
Taking out Saddam allowed the Taliban to get right back to the raping of the Opium farmers wives and children. Not saying I approved of Saddam but I did enjoy the way he had originally curtailed the risk to his Opium revenue.
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