Russia could destroy the planet. Yes they are powerful. The US much more powerful and so dominant economically and politically as well as militarily that it can do things like ask countries to sign letters of support for its wars and they do it. 3 months after that letter the Senate approved a measure supporting the admission of 7 of those countries to NATO and less than a year after that they were admitted to NATO.
UN didn’t authorize Iraq War 2. They only issued a resolution that Iraq had failed to comply with its arms inspections requirements, but that didn’t authorize the US to attack. The US was supposedly going to seek a second resolution specifically authorizing the war, but didn’t when it was clear the vote would fail. Kofi Annan has explicitly stated that the war was illegal under UN law (although he waited till 2004 to make the statement).
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You’re on the side contending that they are ‘offensive weapons’ there.
Things that help you move people into new territory are obviously offensive, and things that destroy those things are obviously defensive. Also obviously, there are things that do both, but it’s not hard to see that an anti-aircraft missile is generally defensive while an armored personnel carrier is generally offensive. War is waged by putting people into new places, and the fact that anti-aircraft missiles might be used by attackers to secure their positions does not change the fact that they are generally defensive weapons.
citation please. I know this gets thrown around a ton, but neither:
“The risks of getting involved in the war in Ukraine outweigh the benefit”
nor
“I don’t believe Russia will invade”
are remotely like what you said.
We’ve had the discussion before:
Objection withdrawn.
It’s irrelevant though to what I said about the US receiving less blowback and US justification for the invasion of Iraq, which is what you were responding to.
Russia didn’t even try to defend their invasion! They didn’t even try to bribe other countries for support (perhaps excepting Belarus)! As best we can tell, Putin just thought he could put out a video saying “Hey, we want to eliminate Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a culture,” and then thought that doing so would be as easy as annexing Crimea (for which he at least put forth a far more plausible justification, that the ethnic Russian majority there wanted to be part of Russia – and given how smoothly that went, I’m not sure he was wrong, and I remain unsure that Ukraine would be justified in retaking Crimea).
I didn’t say they did. I’m not contesting your point that the Russian invasion is more evil. I even started my post with “morality aside”. I just disagreed with the details you gave about the US invasion of Iraq and JohnnyA caught that it was not approved by the UN. I’m not doing anything as childish as accusing you of “carrying water” or “apologia”. I’m just correcting things I think are pretty substantial and incorrect about the US and the Iraq War.
I don’t think trying (succeeding in) bribing countries for support is an indication that a war is justified.
Fundamentally I think both invasions were done for very similar reasons, though I do think the US, being a democracy, needed some semblance of justification part of which was real, a lot of which was manufactured. And the US, being a democracy, must at least hold its military to a higher standard of care for “non-combatants” (though it is very very far from perfect - the US did flatten cities).
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The US didn’t supply weapons of any kind to Chechnya. This is entirely something you’ve made up. To my knowledge not even Putin alleges this. He alleges that the US gave intelligence support to the Chechens.
No, obviously not, because I think that the Iraq war was unjustified. But I do think it is at least slightly better, or at the very, very, very least less likely to incur international blowback, than just going it alone while putting out a video promising genocide.
I think the distinctions you draw here are meaningful and distinguishing from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even if, again, the US invasion of Iraq was horrible and unjustified. Russia doesn’t even pretend that mass rape is anything less than honorable.
I think Russia is a worse country and cares less about atrocities because it’s not a democracy. The US has stellar propaganda and can commit a lot of atrocities without many Americans recognizing them as such, but Russia can just do it and not care as much whether or not people believe.
Russia is not the most extreme example of this, but it’s a non-democracy that gets an awfully high percentage of it’s wealth from fossil fuels and that is explained at 12:36-13:18.
he didn’t make it up, and putin has alluded to it, while russian politicians and members of parliament gave it more air.
almost every scenario exists as a conspiracy theory, and has been circulated, because there’s actual agency behind the disinformation. although some circulated wider than others. chechnya in the 90s was blamed for a lot of shit within russia, it was natural to mix in the old western boogeyman. but still it doesn’t get brought up often, like some other near certain conspiracies. just doesn’t resonate with people like that. it’s hard to believe both that the US came in to rig the election for yeltsin and armed the separatists at the same time.
This is all entirely beside my point, which is that setting the red line which NATO cannot cross at “deploying your weapons to strike the Russian homeland” is the absolute maximum level of tolerance that can be expected from a nuclear power. Presenting a thesis on why Russia are definitely the baddies here doesn’t change anything.
The better US analogy would be not Iraq but Cuba, where the US attempted to invade the country and, after that failed, settled for a crippling economic blockade, essentially forcing Cuba to seek help from the Soviets. Then when the Soviets were like “tyvm for the ally, we’ll be stationing missiles there now” the US were not like “well I guess we were the baddies here when you think about it, so now we have to let you do what you want, those are just the rules”. They took the world to the brink of nuclear war to avoid even heightened threat to the US homeland, let alone actual military strikes.
It’s not exactly hard to believe that the US surreptitiously supplied weapons to groups fighting against perceived russian interests. That’s something we’ve done in numerous other areas and contexts.
Well, I agree with your point that it’s provocative in Ukraine, but that point was crossed in Turkey quite a while back and the USSR strenuously objected. US deployed nuclear missiles in Turkey in 1961, the year before the Cuban Missile crisis. In another demonstration of how much more dominant the US has been and continues to be, it still has an airbase with nuclear weapons in Turkey and the USSR was forced out of Cuba.
Putin alleged that the US were “providing technical support, transporting fighters from one place to another”. I haven’t been able to find any claims that the US were providing weapons. There’s a whole article about it here:
https://www.russiamatters.org/node/20317
Even if everything Putin alleged were true, it’s hardly comparable to supplying high-tech weapons to an adversary which allow them to strike the Russian homeland from a distance.
Right, basically the Soviets backed down despite having to make concessions to the US that the US were not prepared to make in return.
depends on the decade you are talking about. in the 2000s, chechens too closely resembled islamist extremists, and russia was an ally in the war on terror. sooo … usa probably didn’t want to get caught selling arms there?
anyways, this is kind of the point of disinformation. its mere existence derails any analysis of ongoing real conflicts with alternative realities of past ones.
someone mentioned that putin’s old kgb training must have kicked in. every time he speaks is an operation to deceive the listener, even if he sometimes produces technically accurate statements.
fact checking putin is a thankless job. putin has equated chechens, taliban, and mujahideen, while propagandists interchangably used the term terrorist to refer to either group. is it a sleight of hand or simply a new conspiracy theory to also mention that US armed the mujahideen in afghanistan? maybe, who knows. but it was for sure intentional.