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Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.

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I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything, and I hope you’ll bear with me in a somewhat longer edition of the Daily today for a personal exploration of the issue.

In retrospect, almost no American war except the great crusade against the Axis seems to have been necessary, especially for the people who have had to go and fight such conflicts. How could we have asked our military men and women to endure death and mutilation and horror in 1991 so that a bunch of rich Kuwaitis could return to their mansions, or in 2003 so that we could finally settle scores with a regional dictator? Yesterday, The Bulwark ran a searing, must-read reminiscence of the Iraq War written by a U.S. veteran that reminds us how high-flown ideas such as “national interest” or “international order” play little role on the actual battlefield.

And yet, there are just wars: conflicts that require the use of armed force on behalf of an ally or for the greater good of the international community. I was an advocate for deposing Saddam by the mid-1990s on such grounds. Here is what I wrote in the journal Ethics & International Affairs on the eve of the invasion in March 2003:

The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts.

Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime(and wars have started over less), but taken together they are a brief for what can only be considered a just war.

Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war, ostensibly to counter a gathering threat of weapons of mass destruction. (Preemptive war, by the way, is a war to avert an imminent attack, and generally permissible in international law and custom. Preventive war is going to war on your own timetable to snuff out a possible future threat, a practice long rejected by the international community as immoral and illegal. The Israeli move at the opening of the Six-Day War, in 1967, was preemptive; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, was preventive.

Of course, the Iraqi dictator was doing his damndest to convince the world that he had weapons of mass destruction, because he was terrified of admitting to his worst foe, Iran, that he no longer had them. (He sure convinced me.) But this was no evidence of an imminent threat requiring instant action, and the WMD charge was the shakiest of limbs in a tree full of much stronger branches.

Bush used the WMD rationale as just one in a kitchen sink of issues, likely because his advisers thought it was the case that would most resonate with the public after the September 11 terror attacks. For years, most Western governments saw terrorism, rogue states, and WMD as three separate problems, to be handled by different means. After 9/11, these three issues threaded together into one giant problem—a rogue state supporting terrorists who seek to do mass damage—and the tolerance for risk that protected the Iraqi tyrant for so many years evaporated.

In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history. Knowing what I now know, I would not have advocated for setting the wheels of war in motion. And although Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for this war, I could not have imagined how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with “transformation,” the idea that the U.S. military could do more with fewer troops and lighter forces, would undermine our ability to conduct a war against Iraq. As Eliot Cohen later said, “The thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this.”

My own unease about the war began when America’s de facto military governor, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi military and embarked on “de-Baathification,” taking as his historical analogy the “denazification” of Germany after World War II. This was bad history and bad policy, and it created a massive unemployment problem among people skilled in violence while punishing civilians whose only real association with Baathism was the party card required for them to get a good job.

And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better. Like many of our leaders, I was still amazed at the collapse of the Soviet Union, appalled at Western inaction in places like Rwanda, and convinced (as I still am) that U.S. foreign policy should be premised on a kind of Spider-Man doctrine: With great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, in my case, this turned into supporting what the late Charles Krauthammer in 1999 called “a blanket anti-son of a bitch policy,” which he described as “soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.” Krauthammer was right, and people like me were too willing to argue for taking out bad guys merely because they were bad guys. But that word blanket was doing a lot of lifting in Krauthammer’s formulation; perhaps we cannot go after all of them, but some sons of bitches should be high on the list. For me, Saddam was one of them.

The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power. (Is the world better off because we left Bashar al-Assad in power and allowed him to turn Syria into an abattoir?) Yes, some rulers are too dangerous to remove; Vladimir Putin, hiding in the Kremlin behind a wall of nuclear weapons, comes to mind. Some, however, are too dangerous to allow to remain in power, and in 2003, I included Saddam in that group.

In 2007, Vanity Fair interviewed a group of the war’s most well-known supporters. Even the ur-hawk Richard Perle (nicknamed in Washington the “Prince of Darkness” when he worked for Ronald Reagan) admitted that, if he had it to do over again, he might have argued for some path other than war. But the comment that sticks with me to this day, and the one that best represents my thinking, came from Ambassador Kenneth Adelman. In 2002, Adelman famously declared that the war would be “a cakewalk,” but five years later, he said:

The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN’T DO. And that’s very different from LET’S GO.

Twenty years later, that’s where I remain. The cause was just, but there are times when doing what’s right and just is not possible. For almost 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Allied victory over Iraq, the United States had the chance to deepen the importance of international institutions. We squandered that opportunity because of poor leadership, Pentagon fads (the “Office of Force Transformation” was disbanded in 2006, shortly before Bush finally removed Rumsfeld), and amateurish historical analogies.

Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War. You’ll see arguments that experts supported it. (Most academics and many civilians in D.C. did not.) You’ll hear that it was a right-wing crusade backed only by a Republican minority. (Also wrong.) Had the war been executed differently, we might be having a different conversation today.

The fact remains that the United States is a great power protecting an international system it helped to create, and there will be times when military action is necessary. Fortunately, most Americans still seem to grasp this important reality.

Would I argue for another such operation today? If the question means “another massive preventive war far from home,” no. I have consistently opposed war with Iran and any direct U.S. involvement in Ukraine. I wrote a book in 2008 warning that we should strengthen the United Nations and other institutions to stop the growing acceptance around the world of preventive war as a normal tool of statecraft.

I also, however, supported the NATO operation in Libya, and I have called for using American airpower to blunt Assad’s mass murders in Syria. Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it would be another mistake to draw the single-minded conclusion (much as we did after Vietnam) that everything everywhere will forever be another Iraq. The world is too dangerous, and American leadership too necessary, for us to fall into such a facile and paralyzing trap.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

Please Get Me Out of Dead-Dog TikTok

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.

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A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.

The result is wrenching. A dog is always dying, and someone is always hurting. Likes and sympathetic comments amass. The video goes viral. Engage with one—or even just watch it to completion—and you may be served another, and another. Suddenly, you’re stuck in a corner of TikTok you’d rather not see.

“TikTok has to figure out a way to separate dog content from ‘my dog died’ content,” one user observes in a video from February. He says he can’t stand watching the latter, and his comment section is filled with people agreeing. “The amount of dogs I’ve never met that I’ve cried over is unreal,” one writes.  

Dead-Dog TikTok gets at a core tension of the platform writ large. TikTok collapses social media and entertainment, and gives an outsize power to its “For You”–feed algorithm: The user has limited control over what shows up on their feed. Unlike, say, on Reddit, where you might enter a rabbit hole by choice (maybe because you’ve subscribed to the True Crime forum), TikTok’s algorithm might throw you down one based on metrics that may not signal your actual interest.

And in the case of Dead-Dog TikTok, the algorithm can’t know what it means to plop a stranger’s pet loss next to a teen bopping to the latest viral trend or a snippet from late-night television. It can’t recognize that a user’s intention behind posting their dog’s last moments—for catharsis, for validation, to find other people who have felt that same loss—may not be a match for many viewers on the other side who are just trying to pass some time. “We often ascribe all sorts of intentions to the algorithm, like, Oh, it knows,” Nick Seaver, an anthropology professor at Tufts University who studies algorithms, told me. “But it really doesn’t.”

[Read: What happens when everything becomes TikTok]

The tension is unresolvable, which is possibly why TikTok rolled out a feature last week allowing users to “start fresh” with a new feed. TikTok, for its part, sees the solution as diversifying the content. “In addition, we work to carefully apply limits to some content that doesn’t violate our policies, but may impact the viewing experience if viewed repeatedly, particularly when it comes to content with themes of sadness, extreme exercise or dieting, or that’s sexually suggestive,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Whatever equation powers TikTok’s For You feed appears to have picked up that videos about dead dogs engage users. But it doesn’t seem to know when to stop serving it, and it tends to go too far, perhaps even by design. “When it finds something that works, it will go and try to push that—both at the individual level and the overall ecosystem level—pretty far,” Kevin Munger, a political scientist at Penn State who has studied the TikTok algorithm, explained to me. “It’s not going to stop at the right level.” To use a positive analogy, it’s as if the algorithm has figured out that you like cake, and so it’s serving you cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

An algorithmic reset may not be able to totally solve this problem—in theory, the app will relearn what you like and serve videos accordingly. Some of the researchers I spoke with said that they very intentionally—even aggressively—signal to the platform what they do and don’t like. When they see a video of a type they don’t want more of, they take action: swiping away quickly, seeking out positive videos, reporting the upsetting content, even closing the app altogether. Other options include blocking specific users or hashtags, or pressing the “not interested” button.

As Robyn Caplan of the Data & Society Research Institute pointed out, an algorithm “can’t necessarily tell the difference between something that is making you cry and something that is making you laugh.” She told me she once asked a friend for funny videos to help “cheer up” her feed.

Grief is a nuanced human experience. “There’s not an obvious context in which you might want to watch videos about pet grief,” Seaver said. “And so it totally makes sense that these systems do these kind of clunky moves, because I don’t think there’s a non-clunky way to do it.” At its best, Dead-Dog TikTok may offer a support community to people suffering and normalize their pain.

[Read: There are no ‘five stages’ of grief]

Take Blaine Weeks. Weeks thought she had more time with her dog Indica—a few weeks or months, maybe. He was old, and his body seemed to be failing. Then one day, he didn’t want to get up. “I felt like I just didn’t have enough,” she told me. “I didn’t have enough pictures, I didn’t have enough videos, and I was distraught about that.” Weeks decided to record Indica’s last day, worried that otherwise she might block it out entirely with grief.

In the video montage of that day, which Weeks posted to TikTok, she loads Indica into her truck, and they get McDonald’s burgers as a final treat. Weeks tells him that she loves him as he licks tears from her face. Later, on the floor of the vet office, Indica perks up enough to eat a few fries, before resting his head in Weeks’s lap. It ends there.  

The post has been viewed 13 million times and climbing. “Randomly last night that video started going crazy again and got, like, another 400,000 views,” she told me when we talked earlier this month. Weeks said that she’d had to turn off her phone for a bit because of negative comments on the video (detractors questioned Weeks’s decision to euthanize) but that overall she’d found comfort from the experience. The video, she said, connected her with more than a dozen people whom she can talk with about her grief. “We kind of check on each other back and forth, saying, ‘Hey, are you doing okay today?’ ‘Yes, I’m doing okay. How are you?’” A stranger made a painting of Indica and sent it to her.

Stefanie Renee Salyers’s TikTok saying goodbye to Princess, her Shih Tzu, has been viewed 28 million times and has nearly 90,000 comments. Salyers got so many messages after posting that she created a Google Form for other people to share their dog-grief stories, offering to read them privately or—with their permission—create TikToks about their lost pets. “I felt, I guess, glad that, even though my video is of a very sad event, that there were people who saw it and felt like, I’m not alone in feeling this grief. And I’m not crazy for feeling like I lost a family member,” she told me.

Crystal Abidin, the founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network—a group that connects scholars doing qualitative research about TikTok—and a professor at Curtin University, in Perth, Australia, has been studying the comment sections on TikTok grief posts at large. She has found “a really beautiful ethos of care work happening” there: people comforting one another, resource sharing, and more.

Videos like Saylers’s and Weeks’s may inspire others to post their own pet-loss stories. Abidin believes that the pandemic really mainstreamed videos about grief and death on the platform—videos from individuals, videos from health-care professionals. “There is a whole collision of these histories and people of different standpoints and expertise, all on GriefTok,” she told me. “It’s not bad; it’s not good. It’s just that you cannot choose what you want on your feed. And that can be arresting for a viewer.”

Dead-Dog TikTok may be a genuinely helpful space for some, and an upsetting one for others. The platform can’t perfectly sort who’s who. “But if we think about your personal ethos, principles, and morality, do we really want platforms to be the arbiter of what we should and shouldn’t see?” Abidin asked. Maybe TikTok could be smarter about not circulating distressing content, but should it really decide who grieves online and how?

Grief is messy and complicated and hits different people in different ways. So it is only natural that its manifestations online would likewise be messy and complicated. To grieve is to be human—one thing that algorithms, no matter how eerily attuned to our interests and desires, never can be.

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