LNG is more expensive than Russian gas so it makes or made economic sense to do that.

Does it make sense now that the pipeline is shut down and Russia is in conflict indirectly with Western Europe?

Hindsight is 20/20. There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical that russia would turn off the tap. There's always counterparty risk when importing things, the US could also decide to cut europe off from LNG if they wanted.

Russia has only turned off the tap after Europe had already turned off every possible economical tap flowing in the direction of Russia, so in a sense, Europe did it all by itself. Sure, it's the right thing to do for Europe as no one want to help Russia sponsor the war on Ukraine... but that doesn't change the fact that Russia wouldn't just turn off the tap without Europe turning highly hostile to it and basically leaving Russia no option (it's costing much more to Russia than to Europe).

This is not true, Russia started reducing output last summer. Before their invasion of Ukraine.

That pipeline runs through Ukraine to an old & dying oil field- Russia was fighting with Ukraine about transit costs and graft and wanted to turn on Nordstream II next. It wasn't about sticking it to the Germans for no reason.

They spent billions to create the second pipeline to *increase* exports... are you trying to say they didn't have interest in increasing output? Why?!

At this point it is obvious that their occupation of Ukraine outweighs the $11 billion cost of the new pipeline. That's just the total cost by the way, not who paid what exactly.

The US has been a stable ally since the end of WWII and really prior for countries other than Germany. It’s also quite hard for a president to just unilaterally suspend trade. US sanctions require acts of congress, and it would be hard to get an anti European majority in the senate. So no, there was never any risk of the US suspending trade.

Meanwhile Russian has almost always been hostile to or at least in competition with Western Europe. Moreover Russia’s Duma follows Putin’s lead.

It is easy to say that now. Serious criticism of Putin/modern Russia in the West really only began after the invasion of Georgia and was not even remotely mainstream until the early 2010s. America literally banned the export of crude oil from 1970-2015 so their energy worries were not entirely unfounded. Also, nowadays most sanctions are done unilaterally by the executive branch.

LNG is expensive because you have to outbid the global market to get it. It would have been expensive and damaged the German industry 5 years ago as well. Maybe it would have been better to do it at their pace, but it's not like sacrificing cheap energy and natural resources is an easy step to take.

> LNG is more expensive than Russian gas so it makes or made economic sense to do that.

It only made sense if one pretends that Russia is not Russia.

To get there you'd have to forget to take into account all of the factors, namely that Russia's culture will always bring it back to trying to conquer its smaller/weaker neighbors.

Risk is a factor when considering economic security. Whether something makes economic sense must include that factor or it's a garbage calculation. The EU widely ignored this obvious risk regarding Russia. It has been obvious what Putin was for at least 15-20 years. And anybody that missed it after 2014 is an outright fool. I remember reading about his moves to strip the Russians of human rights in the early days of his reign and it was quite clear what he was doing and what direction he was going (standard Russian authoritarian), all of this is the natural culmination. I don't believe the EU was taken by surprise by Putin's choices, they merely wanted their cake and wanted to eat it too (for as long as possible), which is pretty typical behavior. Now they get to pay for that willful mistake.

I’d be interested to see that documentation if you have it handy.

Sadly I’m on my phone and some stuff I want is locked up in Jstor , but look into the France-Germany-Russia troika in the run up to the 2003 invasion. Schroeder was pushing a bigger gas deal with Russia at the time and selling it on the basis of European independence.

The difference is that when the US invaded Iraq, Germany complained a bit but didn't do much else, but when Russia invaded the Ukraine, Germany decided to cut Russia off economically. The reason why the US is a "reliable partner" is that German politics is willing to accept American wars. And before we hear any cries of, "Iraq was different," recall that it was an illegal war of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, led to large scale torture, and generally caused a monumental societal collapse in Iraq.

>And before we hear any cries of, "Iraq was different," recall that it was an illegal war of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, led to large scale torture, and generally caused a monumental societal collapse in Iraq.

I've been trying to come to terms with this since the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the details on the ground are significantly different. But it doesn't change the legal reality of what occurred. I've come to the same conclusion about Iraq recently.

I was an 18 year old US Army infantryman getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2007. I made the decision back then to not go, because ultimately something just felt completely wrong about it during training. The guilt around that had haunted me ever since. It wasn't until this year that I understood clearly what I did was the right decision, and felt vindicated. The entire last 20 years, our country has been engaged in global terrorism led by the neo-con hawks like Rove, Rumsfeld, and Bolton. It's sickening to truly realize and accept the horrible things we did, but I am forever grateful for having refused to take part.

You’d definitely made the right decision for yourself, and possibly in the general case.

I’d add that while the bursts of hawkishness in US foreign policy are awful, they pale in comparison to the barbarism of other past powers or modern regional powers. That isn’t meant to excuse anything, but look at the Russian invasion and the intentional atrocities being committed. Compare that to the invasion of Iraq and I think any honest reading will reflect governments and societies with very different values.

I cannot see how one can claim that the US invasion of Iraq was less barbaric than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. The US practiced torture, as we all found out when the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. The US worked with Shiite militias that conducted ethnic cleansing and torture on a massive scale. The US put down uprisings in places like Sadr City, Najaf and Fallujah with full urban ground invasions. As a result of the invasion, Baghdad turned into a warzone for years, and the city's religiously mixed neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed (or however you refer to its religious equivalent). Iraq became a byword for failed state.

Finally, I would tell anyone who talks about "values" to take a look at the "Collateral Murder" video, in which helicopter pilots crack jokes while shooting explosive rounds into the windshield of a van full of children.[0] Only two people have gone to jail for that: the soldier who leaked the video (Manning) and the guy who published it (Assange).

0. https://youtu.be/zYTxuW2vmzk

The collateral murder video was a national scandal, people were appalled and it was fairly unique among a trove of videos and documents. Ukraine is unearthing mass graves on a daily basis full of mutilated civilians. The laundry list of confirmed war crimes including video is overwhelming. There’s loads of evidence of people all the way up the Russian chain of command encouraging atrocities. Moreover the conflict is less than a year old. For fuck’s sake the Russians intentionally bombarded a maternity hospital.

A national scandal? There were never any consequences, except for the people who brought the video to light.

The US was involved in plenty of war crimes in Iraq, such as the following documented cases:

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massa...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah_killings_of_April_200...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaqi_incident

The US worked with militias, such as the Wolf Brigade, that were notorious for conducting torture (in particular, it has come out that US forces passed on detainees to the Wolf Brigade for torture).[5] At the height of the war, bodies were being dumped in the open every day in Baghdad with gruesome signs of torture.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Brigade_(Iraq)

> I cannot see how one can claim that the US invasion of Iraq was less barbaric than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died.

>> Estimates of the total number of Iraqi war-related deaths are highly disputed. According to Keith Krause of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, "the consensus seems to be that around 150,000 people died violently as a result of the fighting between 2003 and 2006."[1]

I am in no way attempting to justify or defend the Iraq War, which I and many believe was both illegal and a Republican political gambit to stay in power by heartlessly leveraging outrage from the 9/11 attacks. I think one can make the argument that both the wars in Iraq and Ukraine were invalidly justified using manufactured and outright false intelligence. But while yours and other comments above are searing, astute and poignant, in essence both it and previous opposing and supporting comments are tu quoque arguments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tot...

Estimates of total deaths in Iraq due to the war generally come up with a figure of several hundred thousand. You can look at the page you linked to for examples of these studies.

Iraq Body Count tracked 120k individually verifiable civilian deaths in Iraq through 2011 (a figure that has increased significantly since, due to the rise of ISIS, which was a side-effect of the Iraq War). But in a war zone, many (maybe even most) deaths go unrecorded. If you use survey methods (going random homes to ask for death certificates) to try to get a statistical estimate of the number of deaths, you find a number that is a factor of a few higher, as several studies in Iraq have shown.

While most estimates are between 150K to 250K, with at least one published estimate as high as 1.2M, the point of the quote was not to argue about causality numbers, but to demonstrate that numbers are "highly disputed," with an example of a lower estimate and claim of consensus.

IBC project in particular has issues, including accusations of internal anti-war bias and biased sources. IBC has been accused of both undercounting and overcounting. In any regard, due to so much criticism from all sides, other studies are probably more reliable, but even these do not agree.

My larger point was using the Iraq War in comparison to the Russo-Ukraine War to argue the US is no better than Russia, or vice versa, is tu quoque fallacy.

Most scientific estimates are in the range of half a million to a million, with the one outlier being the study conducted by the Iraqi Health Ministry itself. One possible explanation for that is that people might have been afraid to speak to representatives of the ministry, given that it was controlled by a Shiite politician who had connections to militias.

> Most scientific estimates are in the range of half a million to a million, with the one outlier being the study conducted by the Iraqi Health Ministry itself.

I'm not sure what studies were not scientific and which were, but I don't get that at all from the wiki section on total Iraqi causalities.[1] Ignoring lower US military estimates accused of undercounting, about half of estimates are below 200K and about half above 250K. And again, all of the studies are disputed with those in the higher range taking the most criticism towards methods and bias, such as IBC and the Lancet studies. The lower estimates, which seem to be missing deaths that were not immediate, are by Swiss Developmental Studies, Iraqiyun, Iraqi Heath Minister, IFHS, and the higher estimates with a large range variance between 250K-1M+ are by IBC, Lancet, ORB, and PLOS Medicine, which seem to be including homicides, suicides and car accidents. I don't really understand why any group would intentionally underestimate or intentionally inflate casualty estimates, but some, most or all obviously did. Some studies, like D3, seem to suggest fully half the Iraqi population was injured or killed. This all seems bizarre, that estimates are so widely varied and criticized, considering at the time it was the most covered war by journalists in history. The surreal feeling at the time was that it was all televised. It seems unlikely most if any were infiltrated by US covert intelligence white washers, but I can't fathom any overarching reason for such wide variance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tot...

The scientific studies are the ones based on survey methods, which were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Iraqiyun estimate was not published and didn't explain its methodology. The Iraq Body Count isn't a scientific survey - it keeps track of deaths that are reported in the media. It's highly unlikely that every (or even most) deaths that occur in a war in a country like Iraq (recall how dangerous Iraq was at the height of the war) will be recorded in the media.

That leaves the ILCS, the two Lancet studies, the PLOS study, and the Iraqi Health Ministry's estimate.

The ILCS was carried out only a year into the war, before the height of the violence (which was 2006). It was not focused on determining deaths - the question about deaths was only one of many questions asked. Nevertheless, this study found a far higher death toll than IBC.

The Iraqi Health Ministry was run by one of the parties to the civil war, so it's questionable whether people would have felt are liberty to speak freely to the Ministry's workers, especially about something as sensitive (and potentially incriminating) as deaths in the family.

The first Lancet study was also carried out relatively early in the war, but found a much higher death toll than IBC. The 2nd Lancet study was carried out in 2006, after violence had exploded, and found a number of several hundred thousand, but with large error bars. The later PLOS study was much larger and had smaller error bars, and found a number around half a million.

> the most covered war by journalists in history. The surreal feeling at the time was that it was all televised. It seems unlikely most if any were infiltrated by US covert intelligence white washers, but I can't fathom any overarching reason for such wide variance.

I don't know how Iraq compares to other wars in terms of coverage, but most of the country was not well covered. Western journalists were heavily concentrated in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, or embedded in US military units. During the height of the violence, it was extremely dangerous to wander around Iraq as a foreigner. Every study (even the one by the Iraqi Health Ministry) found death tolls far in excess of what IBC documented from media reports.

Maddening. Rant is about all I can do with this. A small goon mob of GoP operatives dressed in blazers intimidating Florida election officials in Nov. of 2000 stops the vote recount leading to a genuine stolen Presidential election, which leads to exceptional political shenanigans to leverage pain and anguish with false intelligence and lies to justify a war killing hundreds of thousands for the sole purposes of remaining in power in order to keep the richest or the rich the richest of the rich. The Republican Party should be banned, and if everyone would just vote in their personal economic interests and stop being distracted by irrelevant issues, we'd never see anything like this or Trump again. Nearly everyone, excepting the uber rich, the multi-hundred millionaires and billionaires, would be economically better off with a long-sustained liberal government, and the uber rich certainly wouldn't be slumming it. Anyone voting Republican without an income of at least $350K/yr is sinking their own tiny boat and taking everyone down with them, except, of course, the uber rich. They should put a cap on wealth of $150M and appropriate all wealth gains above that for even distribution. Who has a problem with this? How many are going to bitch about only being able to have $150M? Seriously, billionaires and half-billionaires really, legitimately and provably, are the source of all problems, which fundamentally are economic problems, that inevitably make their way down to everyone else. End rant... and fallacious but, I think, still somewhat compelling argument.

There is no evidence that the Russian invasion is more barbaric than the US invasion of Iraq.

In fact they seem to show (to a certain extent) some restraint with regard to civilian infrastructure, while America bombed everything from the sky for 1 month before invading.

In terms of intentional atrocities every army has its bad apples, and I'm sure there is a Russian equivalent of Abu Graib. But there is no evidence there is a deliberate policy by the Russian military to commit war crimes.

The French sent an elite unit of the scientific police to investigate Bucha. They came back months ago with not a single press conference, audition, report. Nothing, nada. Why? Why aren't they telling the world about the alleged Russian war crimes they witnessed there?

> But there is no evidence there is a deliberate policy by the Russian military to commit war crimes.

One word.

"Children"

https://ibb.co/NZ0qCqg

And they were targeted for it. Six hundred dead civilians. Russia has lost any and all claims to being human, let alone civil.

> I was an 18 year old US Army infantryman getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2007. I made the decision back then to not go, because ultimately something just felt completely wrong about it during training.

So you went AWOL? I’m a little confused on how an 11B E-2 can “decide“ he’s not deploying.

> So you went AWOL? I’m a little confused on how an 11B E-2 can “decide“ he’s not deploying.

E-3 actually. I was an Eagle Scout, Civil Air Patrol cadet, three years of high school JROTC - the full nine yards. Completely brainwashed. But yes, I ultimately went AWOL.

A week before our deployment, I hitchhiked out to the desert and lived in a tent for a month. Turned myself in right before the 30 day desertion mark, took my article 15 and got busted to E-1. I was able to secure an honorable discharge with the help of a few sympathetic commanding officers after explaining everything, but they put me out pretty quickly “in the best interest of the Army”.

This was the height of the surge in '07, where we were losing over a hundred guys a month. My mom's best friend had already seen her son come home in a casket. The guys I served with came back as shattered husks. I have zero regrets choosing life over death.

I’m honestly surprised you were able to secure an honorable discharge, especially at that time. I was an 11A later in the wars and the guy in my platoon who went AWOL to avoid deploying was sent to RCF before being allowed to exit the Army.

Anyway, good luck to you.

> but when Russia invaded the Ukraine, Germany decided to cut Russia off economically.

Yeah, 8 years after invasion, maybe.

My point is that Germany chose further reliance on Russian gas as a response to the Iraq war, they didn’t just complain. Making that choice looks pretty naïve in hindsight.

I’m not here to justify the Iraq war, and no good faith reading of my post would suggest that.

Germany imported Russian gas because it was cheap.

It had nothing to do with the Iraq War. If you look at a graph of German natural gas imports from Russia by year, you will not see any major changes after 2003. Imports from Russia (back then, the USSR) reached 50% of total imports in the 1980s, and flatlined after that.[0]

0. https://rujec.org/article/55478/zoom/fig/11/

Don't confuse the meme of Germany's "dependence" on Russian gas being "the root" of yhe current "evil inflation" with facts. Not to mention that regardless of all other sanctions, following a war Russia started, the EU, and the West in general, excluded energy. This left a door open for Russia, it also allowed to mitigate the energy markets problems we currently see. Heck, both sides did their best to prevent damage to the gas pipelines in Ukraine. It was Russia, more precisely Putin, that closed that door and caused the clusterfuck on energy markets.

I say energy markets, because global availability of gas doesn't seem to be an issue, prices are. Gas shortages have nothing to do with crazy electricity prices lately. And even then there were no shortages or blackouts anywhere in Europe so far. Energy prices did hurt industry and drove inlfatuon, sure, but this is a global issue not sole caused by the war in Ukraine, COVID, Chinese lockdows and the chip shortage all played a role in that. As did the constant injection of money into the global economy since 2008.

I'd add to the list: indirectly creating ISIS, enabling an enormous amounts of ethnic cleaning/genocide of minorities, allowing a takeover of the country by Iran and related militias, and hosing down the place with depleted uranium: https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/09/21/new-study-do...

That has nothing to do with my original comment. As a response to the Iraq war, pivoting to Russia as an energy supplier now looks foolish.

There was no turn to Russia, the USSR was a reliable gas supplier since the 60s and all the way through the Cold War...

It’s a matter of public record that France and Germany were aligning towards Russia and away from the US geopolitically. They referred to it as “the troika”.

Past tense, I still don't see why this was wrong back the day. Also, I never said Europe didn't form closer ties with Russia. I still think thisbis a, generally, good idea. One that is just impossible in the current situation and under the current Russian leadership. Long term so, it is still a viable strategy. Isolating Russia for good is a bad option, IMHO.

That being said, Russia has to end the war in Ukraine, retreat from the occupied territories. And the West has to do some soul searching once this happened, our track record when it comes to invasions and occupations isn't that great in the last 20 odd years.

That's somewhat of an exaggeration. There were "troika" meetings in the late 1990s and in 2003, but France and Germany remained in the US' orbit.

The Iraq War was probably the time of maximum German/French political autonomy, when they publicly opposed the US on a major issue, but there's very little of that spirit left. France and Germany have hitched themselves even more strongly to the US now, to the point that the German foreign minister is talking about decoupling from China (a policy that makes no rational sense for Germany, but which signals that Germany sides with the US in the geopolitical rivalry).

As far as their attitude towards Russia goes, Germany and France have had terrible relations with Russia since 2014, at the latest. Germany tried not to sever all economic ties with Russia, and it tried to negotiate a settlement to the war in the Donbas, but that doesn't mean that relations were friendly.