>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars
This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
For the 2003 invasion of Iraq, people argue that it was illegal because there was no UNSC resolution. The U.S. and U.K. argued that it was authorized under the UNSC resolution that blessed the first U.s. invasion of Iraq. I think that sounds like nonsense, and particularly when you factor in that the actual pretenses for the 2003 invasion were false and probably fabricated by the aggressing parties—it seems like not a stretch to call it an illegal war.
Obviously the 2003 Iraq Invasion doesn't itself get you to OP's 4 million body count, but I hope this is a helpful start.
It was very illegal to put it quite frankly.
As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
Grab some books on the Iraq war.
There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics).
In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
(i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas.
(ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain.
I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
"But the other kids do it too" is never going to work in the ICC. Which explains why the refrain is so common, and why the USA is terrified of the ICC.