Should we then terminate all of the domains and tlds hold by any USA based entity. Reclaim all of the IP space hold by them too? Surely it would solve some starvation issue, and be just, but do we want that?
"It's interesting how the world rallied immediately to the aid of Ukraine in a big way, compared to the middle eastern countries that have been destroyed by the likes of the US and allies, or the South American countries that have been completely destabilized by the US government.
Really makes you think..."
People always seem to forget that when they bring up Afghanistan and Iraq. That doesn't make it right but if you are going to condemn the US for it then you also have to condemn the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Korea and a slew of other nations as well.
And if you do also condemn them then cool, good for not being a hypocrite. But it was still legal under international law so sanctions of any kind don't really make sense.
[0] Look at some wikipedia articles describing various armed conflicts and see which ones mention the UN acting in a significant capacity.
This is a pretty absurd statement and use of the no true Scotsman fallacy. If that's the case, you'd just say "No diplomacy from the US ever 'counts' because they are bigger/more powerful / whatever".
You are a liar. The Iraq War was illegal under international law. It violated every conceivable UN procedure and norm of diplomacy.
No, they didn't, in some of the most notable cases (particularly Iraq 2003.) They made some gestures in the direction of seeking that, did a whip count and knew it would not receive the required support, and went and invaded anyway.
And that takes this to a whole different level as well. The idea that the 174 intelligence agencies intentionally "believed" what they knew were lies, because those lies could be used as justification with some measure of plausible deniability, seems a far more likely explanation. But that likely brings this was from the realm of an illegal war to crimes against humanity as you're looking at the deaths of hundreds of thousands based on intentional, malicious, lies.
If another nation did anything even remotely comparable, those involved would undoubtedly find themselves at The Hague.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War
[2] - https://thehill.com/policy/international/596693-biden-weighi...
ICC actions are almost exclusively limited to things that happen in Africa, although their ongoing investigations appear to include some middle eastern countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_indicted_in_the...
https://www.coalitionfortheicc.org/explore/icc-situations-an...
It's hard to talk about international justice when USA refuses people to be tried at the ICC(like Saddam Hussein) and has a law to invade the Netherlands should an American service member be indicted[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
There is a conceivable universe—not a likely one; the war was both malevolent and stupid—in which setting up a democracy in Iraq made life better for millions of people. Saddam Hussein was a brutal and ruthless dictator. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an elected president.
It's true that my assessment is based on the view that democracies are inherently more just than autocracies, and not any sort of international law regarding sovereignty. I'm not defending the US's invasion of Iraq. However, I do think democracies are better than autocracies, and I think the world should react differently depending on which is at stake.
Again: bear in mind that the invasion was a bad idea and some Americans at the time said so, but there was also some sense that non-involvement was selfish or immoral. There was much less understanding that the pain it would inflict could so far exceed the intended benefits. We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is.
I'm not sure that we have. The single most important concept of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is the vast, yawning difference between going to war primarily to stop one organized government from attacking another and going to war to effect regime change on a country. The former is very easy to do with a powerful professional military and the latter is effectively impossible. I don't think the difference has sunk in for most Americans.
Saddam is known to have had chemical weapons, the line between which and "true WMDs" is pretty thin, if it exists at all.
I don't think that there's much of a "disinformation" campaign here if the New York Times (as well as a third-party international organization) repeatedly documented the existence of said weapons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/question...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousand...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middlee...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...
To my knowledge USA had no treaty with Irak even between the two wars.
who are we? The US government defacto invented the internet. Russia can have their "own internet" if they wanted to, and so does China and these countries probably will.
Whatever US foreign policy is, USA can force corporations making businesses in US to basically do anything US wants. This isn't about equality or justice or whatever here. This is about economic power, who has it and who doesn't. Regardless what war is being waged.
Right now Russia is finding out they have very little economic power.
Organizations such as the EFF wouldn't be allowed to exist in Russia, at least in a form that independent from the whoever seats in the Kremlin.
Edit - Further, his "successor" might have his exact title, but still not quite have the same powers and sway as Putin. My point is their government is something distinctly different in its own right.
The reason we oppose the Ukraine war is because of economic power? That's not the reasoning being used to justify and lionize this particular conflict
>USA can force corporations making businesses in US to basically do anything US wants.
Perhaps, but if the USA government makes businesses do something people find unjustifiable or even objectionable they'll soon find there aren't many more businesses. Not to mention they'll probably find themselves with a lot of protests and legal battles to deal with.
If anything, I'd say that Bin Laden actually mostly met his goals here - He mired the US in an unpopular and horrendously expensive set of wars, that made a LOT of everyday Americans much more mindful of the military industrial machine that is the US state (and I say that as an American). Not to mention we're seeing a more clear decline in US influence abroad because of it.
Did we face a similar set of retaliatory sanctions? No, but that's because the cost/reward structure is hugely different. It's hard to sanction the largest economy in the world, which owns and prints the currency most of the world uses as its reserve, and which is also the military backer that has mostly kept Europe from becoming another series of land wars after WW2.
Thats... just so significantly different from the challenges present with sanctioning Russia.
Even this discussion about the internet - The ICANN is an american company. Hell - well more than half the sites people want to take action here are American companies. If you tried to saction the US by cutting off their internet... are you sanctioning the US or yourself?
A lot of power over the internet is controlled by Western nations that have demonstrated self-interest time and time again, so at some point there will be more and more breakaway groups to escape that one potential method of control.
[0] it's actually already happened, of course, just not in a way most Westerners are impacted by.
The difference between Ukraine and all the other countries invaded in the last 50 or so years is that Ukraine is a real democracy and liberal, modern society.
Iran, Syria, Iraq, etc... are not the same as Ukraine.
We can talk about failed US policy when Russia isn't bombing apartment blocks and nuclear power plants... Or even their lack of an attempt to stop this war when they apparently knew it was coming...
You say you're not pro-US but it seems like you're trotting out the usual defenses for US foreign policy. Which is really just Raytheon policy. I'd love to see the US, Russia, NATO, etc. stop killing civilians. Really shouldn't be controversial, but I guess you could at the very least tell the victims of the families when is the "right time" to get justice.
Or is the issue that people in the Middle East are more deserving of war and strife than a country of blonde hair and blue eyed fair-skinned Europeans?
So that's what it's about. Ukrainians are white so fuck em, right? Too privileged, only been invaded and oppresed like every generation for 1000 years..