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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

So, destroy a country for one man? Good guys americans!

> 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.

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As the parent correctly pointed out, it's not even remotely close to comparable.

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.

Why is it not comparable? Why is cluster bombing a serbian city better than cluster bombing Kiev?

...except for you people calling it "bombing for peace" - https://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1995/11...

>At the rate Russia is going, it'll have intentionally murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians before the war is likely to end

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.

The US didn't kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. You're conflating two entirely different things. 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, a civil war which the US spent enormous resources trying to stop.

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.

US bombed and killed many civilians in bombing of yugoslavia in 1999... even hit a passenger train and then had to speed up the footage to make it seem like an accident - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grdelica_train_bombing (also a bus, tv station, many more bridges, tobacco factory, a group of escaping refugees, etc.)

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

Additional stats: the US and allies directly killed ~ 13 000 civilians during the occupation of Iraq.

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.

>It's likely the Russians have exceeded that number in Mariupol alone in just a few weeks.

Source this.

Can’t grab a link right now but that’s from the Mariupol mayor’s office and reported in The Economist this week. 4000 dead certified at the morgue but 20000 is mayor’s estimate. Doesn’t seem unreasonable an estimate given the backlog and reports of corpses in the street yet to be collected, along with missing persons from bomb shelters etc

>The difference between the two situations is exceptionally obvious and morally clear.

https://youtu.be/JqMQk337p5s

>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 separatist people's republics comprise roughly 15% of the enemy force in Ukraine. For most of the Iraq War, Iraqi Security Forces comprised 82% of the anti-insurgency forces. During the civil war period when most of the civilians were killed, the US only comprised roughly 5% of the soldiers, and they were on the third side trying to stop the fighting.

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.

Not that long ago, I was under the impression that americans knew that they were the "bad guys" in all of those wars, but stood quiet, because they gained cheap oil and other benefits from most of them. I also got that sentiment from eg. the french, when their governments did something bad in any of their (former) colonies. There were even movies/documentaries (Michael Moore comes to mind), or even historic conflicts (vietnam and the Hippie culture around it), showing the US doing bad stuff around the world.

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.

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