> for mostly the same reasons that putin is attacking ukraine now for.

Did the US want to annex that country into the US? And convert its citizens into obedient Americans? And murder everyone who resisted?

Nah, they just set their own dictators, and if they stopped obeying the americans, they violently replaced them. Just look at latin america, Iran, etc. Just scrolling through the wiki article takes a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Perhaps I'm biased, because I'm from a country (Poland) that's actually actively protected by the US from a murderous dictator (Putin). Even when Poland was on her knees in the early ninetiess, the US never tried to install their dicator here, but instead actively promoted democracy and protected us from Russians. The only benefit that US takes from that is that Poland became a part of the global trade network, we pay for US companies for their intellectual property (i.e. piracy is no longer legal) etc.

Amoral countries can still in some cases be a lesser evil. I agree in the case of Poland the US is a force for good, but on the scale of the world the US definitely gives Russian destruction a run for it's money.

The benefit the US gets from protecting Poland is that in doing so it helps keep Russia boxed in, it keeps great influence over the EU (Poland is a pivot of US influence on the EU), thereby greatly helping curtail 2 out of 3 threats to the US's position as the most powerful country on Earth. It's not done out of benevolence but it's quite great for Polish people.

Same can be said for Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea. That's hundreds of millions of people enjoying great lives thanks to being or having been protected by US from the beasts across their borders. At the same time, is there any nation on Earth that's actually grateful for what Putin's Russia did for (to) them?

Yes. Syria and Iran would likely be wastelands if it wasn't for Russian intervention and assistance allowing them to hold their own against Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey, which would have undoubtedly implemented much greater invasion or intervention plans in Syria than they already have. There is also Armenia that isn't Azerbaijan only because of Russian defence guarantees (that don't apply to Nagorno Karabakh), and the Stans would be greatly vulnerable to China if it wasn't for Russia as a counterbalance.

That's, by the way, a result of a 12 year period, compared to the list you gave that's over 80 years.

Those aren't great lives by any means, but avoiding Iran-Iraq V2, or Turkish invasion of most of Syria, a complete Azerbaijani victory, or complete subservience to China, is genuinely a positive. On the greater balance, simply existing as a counterbalance to the US is something that's useful for most of the world, which explains indifférence over Ukraine.

I suppose the issue is that there is precedent for the USA to support democracies until they decide to side against American insterests. Then the US supports a local dictator instead.

Making them US citizens would be too problematic. It's better to make them subject of an easily controllable puppet. And yes, that means killing everyone who resists. A million people if that's what it takes.

Your co-nationals shouldn't have massacred Bosniaks. Ukraine did not engage in ethnic cleansing.

You're probably an american, but in 1999, when the bombings took place, the war in bosnia was already over for ~4 years.

No, I am your Northeastern neighbour. Tito was a commie, but he did the right thing uniting people.

The Serbs are still stirring things up in Bosnia. Stop now and embrace Tito's genius.

So americans bombed serbia/yugoslavia in 1999 because of bosniaks?

You learn something new every day...

Basically. Nobody cared about Kosovo but even more so did nobody want to be responsible for letting a rerun of Srebrenica happen.

Bosniaks -> Albanians. Happy now?

Yeah, it was about ethnic cleansing of Albanians.

I mean, Russian propaganda claims that the reason is the same: intervening in a genocide. But obviously this isn’t the case—Russia started a war in a region of Ukraine that has a lot of ethnic Russians and attributed all casualties (including the Kremlin-backed Russian separatist combatants) as “victims of a genocide campaign” including those who were killed by Russian and Russian-backed forces.

So no, it’s not the same at all as NATO intervening in an actual ethnic cleansing campaign.

US (and a few other countries) attacked Iraq, because propaganda claimed that they had weapons of mass destruction. Let's not forget the time before that, where iraqis supposedly killed babies in a hospital.

Somehow we treat those wars and those agressors differently.

> Somehow we treat those wars and those agressors differently

We really don't. There's been much acknowledgement that the Iraq war was a mistake and wasn't justified, since no weapons of mass destruction were found.

I think it would have been great for countries to sanction the US over it, but at the time, part of Europe also thought that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they'd be a threat to them. But Russia should have sanctioned US and Europe, they should have cut their supply of oil for example. I'd have been for it.

Just as the US should have been sanctioned then, and the war in Iraq should have not happened or been prevented, so is the war in Ukraine.

Normally we should learn from past mistakes, Iraq was a mistake, the world should have acted different back then and didn't. Now Ukraine is a chance to do better and act as we should have in Iraq.

Note: The other distinction is that Iraq was a clear and obvious dictatorship, so there was hope that it could improve the lives of the people of Iraq and lift them into more individual rights and prosperity.

Ukraine is not as clear, in appearance it seems they are on a good path to have more individual rights and prosperity, and it looks like Russia's trying to stop them from doing so. Is that completely accurate, hard to say, but probability wise it is a possibility.

So from the angle of picking a side as well, it's easier to side with Ukraine, which appear to support individual rights and democracy, and against Russia, which appears to oppose individual freedoms and seems to be moving towards full on dictatorship.

> We really don't. There's been much acknowledgement that the Iraq war was a mistake and wasn't justified, since no weapons of mass destruction were found.

But we didn't sanction them. We're still friends with them. We even helped them.

> but at the time, part of Europe also thought that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they'd be a threat to them.

I'm pretty sure 'we' (our leaders, who sent our armies there) knew that iraq had no such weapons... Tony Blair even half admited it.

> Normally we should learn from past mistakes, Iraq was a mistake, the world should have acted different back then and didn't. Now Ukraine is a chance to do better and act as we should have in Iraq.

So, we knew iraq was a mistake, and we stopped? After the first time? Or after the second time? What about syria? Libya? What about somalia? Didn't biden just send more troops there? I won't even mention afghanistan... US basically armed the terrorists for the next few decades with their pull-out.

> Ukraine is not as clear, in appearance it seems they are on a good path to have more individual rights and prosperity, and it looks like Russia's trying to stop them from doing so. Is that completely accurate, hard to say, but probability wise it is a possibility.

Let's be fair... ukraine has areas where a lot of russians live, and they weren't very nice to those russians (and i mean "nice" in the same way as israelis are not "nice" to palestinians...). Somehow many people have forgot about those things (ukraine) or don't care about the others (isreal).

I'm not sure what you're saying, that we should make the same mistakes we did in Iraq with Ukraine as well? Why repeat the same mistakes?

Yes, we didn't sanction them, and you seem to argue we should have, and I agree. That's why I think with Ukraine this time we're doing the right thing, same thing we should have done with Iraq. Do you disagree?

But for americans (and a lot of EU nato members) it's not a "mistake" but just a daily part of their war-fueling politics. If US had to wait until ukraine to realize that all of their wars were "mistakes", why did they send soldiers to somalia after the start of ukraine war? If they sent soldiers there, is it really by mistake? And if they sent soldiers there, shouldn't they be sanctioned? Shouldn't a bunch of other countries be sanctioned for invading afghanistan? Or syria, lybia etc (and still having soldiers there)? Are we really doing the same thing by sanctioning russia, while we (nato members) have our soldiers occpying quite a few countries around the world? If it's a mistake, why not atleast bring them home and stop the occupation, befure we point the finger at putin?

So you're for the war in Ukraine and in all the other countries and against any effort to stop them?

No, I'm saying that we're all the "baddies", and that we should either sanction every country that is occupying any other sovereing country (and that includes most of the nato countries, including mine), or, (preferably by me), we should pull our armies out of those countries, stop being the agressors, and then point the finger at putin. Why the hell does slovenia (my country) have soldiers in fucking Syria? Who asked us to go there? We even have to pay a lot of money to have them there.. for what? What effort have we, the EU, the americans, the "friendly west countries" invested into stopping ourselves from occupying all those countries?

This whataboutism is just more Russian propaganda (it’s a boilerplate argument that gets copy/pasted into every single debate about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). It has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, and the Iraq War doesn’t justify Russia’s conquest of Ukraine.

Why is different though? Except for americans being our "friends", and us helping them?

Nah, I'm not going to accept deflection to unrelated wars. If you want to discuss the Iraq War in an appropriate thread, I'm happy to do so, but it doesn't justify Russia's ongoing conquest of Ukraine.

Nah, iraq war is over... maybe we can discuss syria, since my countries army is currently invading them as a part of nato forces. Maybe even lebanon. We're not in somalia (yet?), but americans are there now too. We luckily pulled our solders out of afghanistan in the last moment, but we were a part of occupying forces there too, just like the belarus army is in ukraine.