Stop lumping Iraq and Afghanistan together. I see this everywhere and it's tiresome. It's either outright lying or people who weren't old enough to make memories when these things happened.
Afghanistan harbored Osama. They refused to give him up. NATO invaded the country to get him. It was justifed.
The fake WMDs were in Iraq (or not, since they were fake). Only the US, UK, Australia, and Poland invaded Iraq. Literally all the other "Western" countries were very strongly opposed and refused to participate. It was an unjust war.
Muhammad Umar told Pakistan that he would be willing to turn bin Laden over to a third country, but the US refused, demanding a direct handover.
>On 21 September, Muhammad Umar rejected both Bush's demands and the advice of the council, again denying that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.
Again, some lunatic from your country just attacks the world's strongest military power, killing ~ 3,000 people, and you refuse? The Taliban deserve exactly what they got.
The only mistake we made in Afghanistan was trying to build a 'nation' out of a geographic collection of hill tribes. We should have locked down the porous Afghan border and let SF and northern alliance troops declare open season. As it stands we didn't so much 'lose' the Afghan war as lose interest in imposing democracy on a people that had no desire for it.
Strange that the NATO did not invade Pakistan, then?
I really don't understand how this question can come up, honestly. This is 1 + 1 = 2 stuff.
Strange they didn't have to kill 40k+ civilians in Pakistan to capture him, like in Afghanistan. Which would have been totally justified, like GP claims. So, why not?
They were both illegal wars that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians for no reason other than getting 1 guy. There were many ways to get him if your government really wanted to.
On a side note, it's pretty bold of you to assume I wasn't around when these wars happened.
> Afghanistan harbored Osama. They refused to give him up. NATO invaded the country to get him. It was justified.
Oh I see, is that how you justify a war?
Let's flip the script here. Ukraine harbors Zelensky as he is deemed a criminal by the Kremlin. Ukraine refuse to give him up. The war in Ukraine is justified.
Do you see the problem with your argument here?
If it's good enough for the west to invade a foreign, sovereign country in order to get 1 man, then it should be good enough for anyone else. You can't have double standards.
> Literally all the other "Western" countries were very strongly opposed and refused to participate.
The opposition from the other countries was a show. Nobody kicked the US out of the SWIFT payment system, nor were any sanctions places on the US.
> It was an unjust war.
The fact that you can't bring yourself to say that it was an illegal war is very telling. Using an euphemism here is rather bold if you ask me.
Voters in Europe are not screaming for cheaper Chinese EVs-- they want economies improved, mostly, and anything weakening the local (automotive) industry (even electrification itself) is regarded very skeptically (especially in countries like Germany, France, Italy).
> You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake WMDs.
I'm not saying that those were justified (especially not in hindsight), but the Americans had gotten hit very hard before and had a somewhat credible justification at the start.
Russia, on the other hand, never experienced a Spetember 11-- they only shot down those civilian airliners themselves (MH17).
Maybe not on that scale but they had a few major terror attacks of their own: Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, the 1999 apartment bombings, the Moscow theater hostage crisis, the Beslan school siege, and most recently the Crocus City Hall attack.
And honestly, Russians have their current and past governments much more to blame for this, considering all the shit they did in Chechnya (starting with mass deportations in '44, followed by 2 wars and a bunch of warcrimes).
Not saying that the US was blameless with all the middle east messups, but IMO Russia collected a lot more karma debt in Chechnya over the last century by comparison...
France had almost 200 people killed in 2015 at the Bataclan. They did not invade another country because of this.
This is a very weak argument.
SH was a dictator for sure but these wars were illegal just the same and I did not see the EU kicking the US out of the swift payment system of impose sanctions on them.
The moral posturing of the west is a show. The west is happy to go to war when it pleases it but should anyone else do it, then that is a problem.
Here is some random example.
https://www.sinnerbikes.com/en/modellen/comfort/comfort-e/
1990
The electric versions are somewhat lagging behind the human powered velo
https://en.velomobiel.nl/snoek-l/
They are not cars but for transporting yourself from a to b they should do more than fine. Almost no power consumption very little danger als they are to light to do the infamous car crash. They use almost no space on the road and the road lasts much longer.
You also get physical activity which extends life span. Travel normally consumes life span. Under 30 minutes per day you get to the destination in 0 minutes.
This is not nearly as hypocritical as people want to think it is.
I suspect that the philosophical root of this position is cultural relativism. The idea that all countries, by and large, are both good and bad and that one country's politics and culture is not necessarily better or worse than another. That a country that throws journalists in prison and doesn't recognize freedom of expression or religion, for example, is on par morally with the United States of America.
Fuck that. That position is literally evil as far as I'm concerned, because it dispenses with the very concepts of liberty and morality, putting the worst of the worst dictatorships on a level footing as free, rights-protecting countries.
In my world view, government is a necessary good but it is necessary because human beings have the capacity for both reason and force. When people deal with one another through reason, we get peace, prosperity and life flourishes (reason is a human being's primary tool of survival). When people choose force we get gang warfare, anarchy, death, destruction and life struggles.
My working definition of "liberty" is an environment where all interpersonal relations are consensual. This is achieved by removing the element of force from civil existence, placed into hands of a monopoly (the government) that recognizes that an individual has rights and uses that monopoly to protect and defend those rights. Never to violate them.
Therefore, and I know this will be controversial (I'm certainly not trying to troll as I genuinely hold this position), a free, rights respecting country, even one that is imperfect, has every moral right to invade and liberate a dictatorship if and when it decides that it is in its best interest to do so.
A country that routinely infringes upon the rights of others is morally illegitimate. It is certainly unfortunate that every country in the world today does that to some extent (taxes are theft). Still, that doesn't mean that you can't evaluate a country based on how well it implements this raison d'etre.
So in any conflict between the USA (or any other rights-respecting country) and <pick one: Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.>, I will side with the USA 10 out of 10 times and I see no hypocrisy. The USA, as a government, is imperfect but still better than China in every single possible way and I have no problem saying that, in my opinion, the Chinese population at large would be better off if the CPP were taken out by a free nation. And yeah, I know that the USA has ended up making things worse, practically, in many countries through interventionism. Iran is a great example. I'm not saying that they should invade any country and I'm not saying that they wouldn't screw it up if they tried. I'm just saying that morally and rationally I would be on their side every time.
I will happily criticize the USA when they lie to us about weapons of mass destruction or anything else. I think that any lie is immoral and they were wrong to do so. This is one of many things that makes the USA imperfect. But I also don't think that they should have NEEDED that lie to justify invading Iraq and ending Saddam Hussein's reign. There are valid arguments to be had about whether or not Iraq is better or worse for liberty today than it was pre-2003. But morally they had every right to go in and should have done it even harder.
Can't place the name of a German guy who espoused a similar kind of Supremacism ("my in-group better than yours").
Don't project.
> Scream Hitler all you want
You're a better judge of your own faults. I had someone else in mind.
You sure 200k+ dead civilians wasn't hard enough of a rampage?
> will happily criticize the USA when they lie
Seems you're more happy when the USA goes on a pillage.
> will side with the USA 10 out of 10 times and I see no hypocrisy
You may not; but others will.
> free, rights respecting country, even one that is imperfect, has every moral right to invade and liberate a dictatorship
You're in for a surprise at the number of dictators the US props up. Also, some critically view Presidential powers as totalitarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
Pretty facetious comparison. Iraq and Afghanistan were on the whole a mistake, but completely different from Ukraine. There was never any idea that the US would take the territory. It was just a huge waste of money for the US.
The very best case scenario for the US (which everyone realized was never going to happen within 2 years) was something like Japan and South Korea, setting up US-friendly democratic governments and corporations. There was absolutely no element of expansionism. Ask the Japanese and the South Koreans whether they are mad about being oppressed under the thumb of "US imperialism".
Contrast this with Russia's actions in Ukraine. They are taking over economically and militarily valuable lands, directly expanding their borders, expelling or re-educating Ukrainians who won't pretend to be Russian, and nakedly pursuing the revanchist fantasy of reclaiming lands that were ruled brutally by a totalitarian Muscovite empire for hundreds of years.
Conflating the two situations betrays an extremely shallow understanding of current events and a complete ignorance of history.
When I step in dog poo on my way to work, that's a mistake. When hundreds of thousands of people are killed by your actions, that is not a mistake as you put it. Especially when your legal standing to do so is shaky if not downright illegal.
My guess is that you agree with the saying: the death of 1 man is a tragedy but hundreds of thousands of them is a statistic.
> setting up US-friendly democratic governments and corporations.
Ok, lets flip the script here. When the US sets up government for their own interest, it's just helping democracy. When Russia does it, we call them puppet governments. Double standards much?
> There was absolutely no element of expansionism.
You are right, the US coalition simply installed military bases there for 20 years and propped up a government that was not capable of doing the job and was not popular either but all that mattered was that it was friendly to the US.
In Lithuania, when the Germans invaded in WW2, they consider that they were occupied by Germany for about 2 years.
The US stayed there for 20 years but according to you, this was not an occupation. You just ran it, tried to change it according what the west thought was acceptable, and interfered in every possible aspect.
I guess I got confused between the two, after all the difference is rather slim.
> Ask the Japanese and the South Koreans whether they are mad about being oppressed under the thumb of "US imperialism".
I am sure the Japanese are rejoicing knowing the US turned two of there cities into ruble in order to test a new weapon.
You cannot be serious. The EU has put up tariffs on EVs because the EU car industry who had 10 years to get ready decided that it was better to keep building diesel engines than invest in EVs.
Now, they are caught with their pants down and they lobbied for the tariffs because they know that as of today the quality and the range of the Chinese EVs are so good that should the Chinese be allowed to sell them unimpeded, the legacy EU carmakers would be bankrupt within the next 5 years.
Then, the politicians go on TV and urge you to take your bicycle to work and to turn off your router at night to save the planet.
> The Ukraine war is the most clear-cut aggressor/victim situation in a long time, even compared to setups like the Vietnam war: There is not even a puppet government with any legitimacy that the Russians could be claiming to act in support of, and there is no credible casus belli either. It's just blatant expansionism at the cost of a sovereign nation.
You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake WMDs. It's funny how people are quick to point that Russia is the aggressor but when the US was invading countries, few people opposed them.
Not to mention the number of south American governments that have been toppled by the CIA.
Rules for thee not for me.