Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren’t enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn’t have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.With the passage of time I think this requires a bit of an explainer. When there were no WMD, some of them fell back on "SADDAM TRICKED US INTO THINKING HE HAD WMD HIS EVIL PERFIDY WAS EVEN WORSE THAN WE IMAGINED" and this is "the silly sanctions were not strong enough to make him stop tricking us into thinking he had WMD, because if he did we would have totes stopped the sanctions."
My explanation doesn't make it any better, but puts the absolutely dribbling lunacy in context.
These were the smart guys, the hippies were the dumb ones.
I was very very skeptical that Russia was about to invade (got that one wrong!) in part because a bunch of Blob adjacent lunatics were running around saying their usual lunatic things (the other part was invading Ukraine seemed insane!) I now trust Biden's foreign policy guys more than I have ever trusted such people!
When Putin's invasion didn't happen precisely when predicted, some of them actually did run with "OH MY GOD HE TRICKED US INTO THINKING HE WAS GOING TO INVADE! THERE IS NO GREATER EVIL!"
And yes the invasion happened. I was wrong! But the through line is these people are never wrong, no matter what insane reasoning they have to come up with to justify it.