Minority in a larger country, minority wants to separate into its own country, the main country won't let them, some conflicts and shooting, shelling, killing, and an "outside player" steps in and starts destroying the main country.
We all agreed that a nation state based approach to the problem of terrorism was absurd, but there was no way any US president would do anything less. Remembering the phrase "a wartime president has never not been re-elected" turns my stomach. Iraq of course was another matter, but Afghanistan was more of a greek tragedy.
It worked out just as badly for us as it did for the USSR and the US later.
I'm not sure why Afghanistan is catnip for overconfident empires, but it seems to be a repeating pattern.
(I wonder if the Chinese will have a go now it's apparently their century?)
So we basically agree, that both countries are bad, but we somehow act as if somehow americans are the "good guys" for bombing weddings in pakistan and killing afghanis, and bunch of other people, and that russians deserve the sanctions, while other countries currently occupying eg. syria don't.
Everything he says is 100% true.
But he never offers suggestions about how to make things better.
Even though I agree with Hedges, empathically, I just can't stand listening to him. He's an Eeyore.
People need hope, affirmation, reasons to keep struggling, a wee bit of joy.
Especially when everything seems so pointless.
Last I checked, noone in the states or the west at large got disappeared or shoved out a window for protesting those actions by their government.
Nobody thinks the US are the good guys for bombing a wedding in Pakistan. It's for countless other reasons that people still think the US are on the side of good, as it always has been. You're of course attempting to use a particularly weak argument to prove a massive claim. The US doesn't have to be perfect to be good. What Germany did in WW2 doesn't preclude them from being good now; what the British Empire did doesn't preclude them from being good now; and so on.
The US have been such extraordinary good guys across time, we even saved millions of Russians from starvation by their own government (even while Russia was broadly considered an enemy of the US at the time, we saved them anyway):
https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-famine-040411.html
Things like that are what have built the US moral credibility, which stacks against its various mistakes (and everyone here knows well all the prominent US mistakes).
The US invaded Germany, the US invaded Italy, the US invaded France (and several other European nations), the US invaded Japan, the US invaded Korea. Now contrast what the US did after invading Europe, with what Russia did. It's the difference between being the good guys and being the bad guys, just ask Poland what the difference is - they know exactly what the stark separation between the US and Russia represents (the difference between freedom and slavery, affluence and poverty). There's a reason why Poland welcomes US soldiers on its soil, and why they'd fight to the death to keep Russian soldiers out of their territory. Ask Czechia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania what the difference is, they all know.
Why are all of Russia's weaker neighbors afraid of it? Meanwhile, there's affluent, free, peace-loving Canada, not afraid in the least (witness their military spending) that the US superpower of the last 75 years would invade and attempt to conquer them. The difference between the US and Russia could hardly be any greater, now or in the past. The Canadians know it, the Polish know it, the Ukrainians know it.
What Russia is doing right now is evil, and they are the villains in this war, regardless of what they did in the past. We don't need to eg go into the history of the Holodomor and other things Russia has done to Ukraine and its people to demonstrate their evil, all we need is to focus on what Russia is doing at present (intentionally genociding the civilians of Ukraine). Russia are the bad guys and it couldn't be any more clear than it is - which is again why Ukraine (freedom-seeking, aspirational democracy, liberal-leaning, West-leaning) is asking the US to help them fight against Russia and why Ukraine appeals to the US about shared liberal values just as they have with other European democracies.
The US didn't train bin Laden. It didn't invent Al Qaeda. It didn't train or create the Taliban either. Funding various Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the decade prior to the founding of the Taliban, doesn't equate to training bin Laden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...
For Bin Laden.
America has done terrible things, but what Russia is doing to Ukraine is much worse than Afghanistan or Iraq.
When in recent history did the UK surround a city of another country and starve it to death whilst deliberately shelling civilians?
There isn't a comparison. Russia's actions in Syria are the most similar to the Ukraine situation that I'm aware of in recent history.
Is this a joke? I can think of three examples in the past 30 years.
I also forgot the highway of death... So four off the top of my head.
In Mariupol, thousands of civilians have died in days of Russian bombing (the mayor estimates up to 20 000, but 4000 already certified) - including the deliberately shelling of civilian buildings by Russian forces. They've cut off power, heating, water, and have bombed theatres, schools, hospitals. Corpses are rotting in the streets.
> When in recent history did the UK surround a city of another country and starve it to death whilst deliberately shelling civilians?
Yugoslavia, 1999... civil buildings were actual targets, not just "accidents"... from tobacco factories, to public television, bridges, etc. Also cluster bombed a city... If you count the "mistakes", also a passenger train, bus, group of escaping refugees, hospitals, schools, etc. Oh, and let's not forget the chinese embassy.
And USA is also currently occupying syria.
The Russians are intentionally destroying entire large cities, intentionally committing genocide against thousands of civilians in Ukraine. Intentionally seeking to starve and deprive the civilian population of the basic requirements of survival to further their conquest aims. At the rate Russia is going, it'll have intentionally murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians before the war is likely to end.
...except for you people calling it "bombing for peace" - https://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1995/11...
And it will pale in comparison to the 300 thousand civilians killed in the US intervention in Afghanistan alone. At least Russia will likely succeed in it's military objectives.
Russia is directly, intentionlly killing the civilians in question in Ukraine. They're doing it on purpose, aiming for the civilians, to terrorize them into submission (and Russia has a very long history of this form of intentional terror-war against civilian populations in the name of conquest). Russia's genocide of Ukrainian civilians isn't a mistake of aiming, it's not an accident of war, it's not a whoops, they're trying to kill them and starve them (see what they're doing to Mariupol at present).
The difference between the two situations is exceptionally obvious and morally clear.
This is urban warfare... ukrainian army hides in civilian buildings, shoot down at russian soldiers and tanks, tanks shoot back, and the damage a tank does is what you then see on tv. There were (now removed) videos on youtube, of ukrainian people trying to get the ukranian army out of their apartment building just because of that.
But looking at history, when US kills civilians, they arrest the whistleblower and threathen the webpage owner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning
It's likely the Russians have exceeded that number in Mariupol alone in just a few weeks.
The difference in these numbers reflects that Russia is deliberately targeting civilians.
I condemn the occupation of Iraq, but agree it is exceptionally obvious that the two situations are in no way equivalent.
Source this.
>You're pretending the US shot, bombed and killed all those civilians, when in fact that was an Iraqi-on-Iraqi sectarian civil war that produced such high civilian deaths,
Typing this and not realizing the obvious parallels to the Donetsk and Luhensk regions of Ukraine is laughable, and forces me to assume you lack the background necessary to make a real comparison between these two situations.
The US-led invasion of Iraq had ~4,000 civilian casualties in its month and half of fighting.
The Iraqi civil war had 70,000 civilian casualties in its 2 years.
The War in Donbas had 350 civilian casualties in its 8 years of fighting.
The Russian invasion has boosted that over 10,000 in less than a month.
And now? It makes me sad, that so many american people actually consider themselves the "good guys" for destroying random countries and killing people there. Like they did nothing bad, when they bombed peoples houses, occupied their countries, stole their oil, etc.