We'll applaud the death of every single invading American, because the more of them die, the less Iraqis will. What do you think is happening here? There is a conflict where one side illegally invaded a country, and had committed multiple atrocities. You should be applauding each American soldier death, because it lessens the chance of more of those atrocities and deaths of innocent civilians.
Only that wasn't anywhere near as black and white.
1) An international coalition had already had to drive Saddam back once before.
2) Saddam was an utterly nasty piece of work.
3) Saddam's regime had used chemical weapons and likely did want nuclear weapons (mainly because Iran were also working on them).
4) The Americans and British did not indiscriminately target civilian areas. Of course there were numerous instances of mistakes happening, but they didn't flatten entire cities.
5) The Americans and Brits did not systematically commit war crimes. There were soldiers there, so unsurprisingly some did occur.
6) There were and have been numerous attempts to get the Iraqis back to governing themselves. It wasn't an attempt to steal territory.
Yes, the whole WMD thing did likely start from an intelligence report being completely blown out of proportion to meet Bush's (and Blair's) idea of the world order (and religious convictions). But the Americans and British were not clearly completely in the wrong.
Compared to the Russo-Ukraine war:
1) Ukraine has a democratically elected government, with no major concerns as to the veracity of the election.
2) Recent Ukrainian governments had committed no atrocities. Isolated incidents in a civil war fuelled by Russia, yes, but nothing systematic.
3) Problematic parts of Ukrainian society have either been quelled or reformed (all prior to the current invasion).
4) Russia has a history of meddling in Ukrainian domestic affairs. Invading Crimea and unofficially Donetsk and Luhansk.
5) Russia and the separatists they back have a record of atrocious
war crimes. Ones that look
systematic.
6) Russia and the separatists have clearly targeted civilians.
7) Russia and the separatists have almost levelled cities.
I'm not sure why I've wasted my time outlining this for you, but here you are. Perhaps this will put someone else going off on some asinine and stupid comparison.