During the Chinese civil war, the Maoists let the Nationalists take a shellacking when convenient. And while I wouldn’t say America was conducive to civilian deaths on “our” side in Vietnam or Afghanistan, it clearly wasn’t something we optimised for: our priority was protecting our troops.
Hamas is a paramilitary. It serves its own forces. The civilians of Palestine aren’t “its” people; they’re a battlefield element.
The Kims are the government of North Korea. That doesn’t mean they serve its people.
> Have they been renounced by the population in favor of any other government?
Difficult to tell. Hamas did away with elections in their 2007 coup [1].
But rest assured that the people that study those things know quite well it's the country leaders declaring wars, not the people.
But I'm still wondering where we should be drawing the line. For example, Russia has arguably not had fair and free elections for over two decades, so should we refrain from saying that there's a war between Russia and Ukraine and instead say that there's a war between Putin's party (United Russia) and Ukraine"?
Some (many) tens of thousands of people were arrested for complaining... But don't bother, their punishment was only half a year or so in prision... And in unrelated news, some (many) tens of thousands of Russian prisoners were sent to die at the Ukraine winter, on the frontline, without guns or even socks.
But no, all Russians are in full support of this war. You can read all about this on the news.
I'm just asking a naive geopolitical question of whether we should in general be talking about countries being at war (and I just offered Russia vs Ukraine as an example), or whether it's more appropriate to think of wars as being between leaderships/militaries, whereas the rest of either country should be considered generally uninvolved? Or if "it depends", where should that line be?
Every false flag operation designed to rally support for a conflict.