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Comment by Karsteski | Hacker News Reader

Goes back to my comment yesterday on the topic of ICANN not removing Russia from the internet:

"It's interesting how the world rallied immediately to the aid of Ukraine in a big way, compared to the middle eastern countries that have been destroyed by the likes of the US and allies, or the South American countries that have been completely destabilized by the US government.

Really makes you think..."

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The morals of US actions in the middle east are debatable but there is one massive objective difference between them and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The US went through all the procedure and protocol to make it legal under international law. They got ascent from other nations and put together a broad international coalition.

People always seem to forget that when they bring up Afghanistan and Iraq. That doesn't make it right but if you are going to condemn the US for it then you also have to condemn the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Korea and a slew of other nations as well.

And if you do also condemn them then cool, good for not being a hypocrite. But it was still legal under international law so sanctions of any kind don't really make sense.

This is an absolute falsehood. The killing started far before any resolutions were passed, before any international consensus was reached.

Assent obtained through diplomatic pressure from a much larger country does not count, the US getting its allies to OK its various invasions counts about as much as Belarus' support of the Ukraine invasion. (It's a complex comparison because Belarus is both subject to much more pressure and is getting involved in a very direct way, but I contend that the pressure/action ratio is similar between the two cases.) There is a reason the UN and the idea of international law is talked about more in the context of Africa than anywhere else[0], it is the only place where none of the countries involved are powerful enough to make a farce of it.

[0] Look at some wikipedia articles describing various armed conflicts and see which ones mention the UN acting in a significant capacity.

> Assent obtained through diplomatic pressure from a much larger country does not count

This is a pretty absurd statement and use of the no true Scotsman fallacy. If that's the case, you'd just say "No diplomacy from the US ever 'counts' because they are bigger/more powerful / whatever".

It's more of a "no true unicorn" than a "no true Scotsman." I cannot think of a single act of international aggression that was truly justified, in the high-minded sense of "international law," only ones which had assent from the allies of the aggressor as well as non-allied states they were able to pressure into going along with it.

>The US went through all the procedure and protocol to make it legal under international law.

You are a liar. The Iraq War was illegal under international law. It violated every conceivable UN procedure and norm of diplomacy.

I also condemn those countries! I live in Canada, and I was reading up on Canada's military actions in the Middle East a few weeks ago. It's sad that Canadian soldiers were a part of those atrocities...

> The morals of US actions in the middle east are debatable but there is one massive objective difference between them and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The US went through all the procedure and protocol to make it legal under international law.

No, they didn't, in some of the most notable cases (particularly Iraq 2003.) They made some gestures in the direction of seeking that, did a whip count and knew it would not receive the required support, and went and invaded anyway.

This is rewriting history. The invasion was generally viewed as illegal [1] with the Secretary General (the head) of the UN stating literally as much at the time. And this was also before it became clear that the evidence we presented for the war was nothing but lies. The notion that 87 intelligence agencies (or whatever the number they gave at the time was) were all just filled with completely inept individuals who somehow couldn't tell the difference between mobile biological weapons labs and trucks used for filling up weather balloons defies belief.

And that takes this to a whole different level as well. The idea that the 174 intelligence agencies intentionally "believed" what they knew were lies, because those lies could be used as justification with some measure of plausible deniability, seems a far more likely explanation. But that likely brings this was from the realm of an illegal war to crimes against humanity as you're looking at the deaths of hundreds of thousands based on intentional, malicious, lies.

If another nation did anything even remotely comparable, those involved would undoubtedly find themselves at The Hague.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] - https://thehill.com/policy/international/596693-biden-weighi...

>If another nation did anything even remotely comparable, those involved would undoubtedly find themselves at The Hague.

ICC actions are almost exclusively limited to things that happen in Africa, although their ongoing investigations appear to include some middle eastern countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_indicted_in_the...

https://www.coalitionfortheicc.org/explore/icc-situations-an...

That's a weird way to phrase it. There have been quite a few cases of people suing the USA at the ICC and winning. It's more the fact that the USA doesn't give a rats ass about decisions at the ICC. But I'm under no illusion to think that China would give a f* if someone sued them there.

It's hard to talk about international justice when USA refuses people to be tried at the ICC(like Saddam Hussein) and has a law to invade the Netherlands should an American service member be indicted[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...

Bad things exist on a spectrum from "kind of bad" to "unadulterated evil". I'd peg the US invasion of Iraq somewhere around "pretty damn malevolent", but also quite far from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

There is a conceivable universe—not a likely one; the war was both malevolent and stupid—in which setting up a democracy in Iraq made life better for millions of people. Saddam Hussein was a brutal and ruthless dictator. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an elected president.

It's true that my assessment is based on the view that democracies are inherently more just than autocracies, and not any sort of international law regarding sovereignty. I'm not defending the US's invasion of Iraq. However, I do think democracies are better than autocracies, and I think the world should react differently depending on which is at stake.

The counterfactual left-alone Saddam would have to do a lot of destruction and killing to work his way up to matching an invasion and occupation.

Saddam had already matched that scale of destruction in the Iraq-Iran war, which killed many times more people. That fact doesn't exonerate the USA (which supported Iraq at the time!) or justify the 2003 war, but the human cost of his reign wasn't small, and given his subsequent invasion of Kuwait there was very little reason to expect he was done with invading and occupying people.

The invasion was a bad, bad, no-good idea, but to add some color to what you're observing, one of the biggest conversations within the US at the turn of the century was whether we should enact foreign policy according to a moral mandate. It was a constant topic of punditry ("Should we be the world's police?") and off the top of my head I can say the movie Airforce One and the tv show Westwing both directly talked about it, and both suggested we should.

Again: bear in mind that the invasion was a bad idea and some Americans at the time said so, but there was also some sense that non-involvement was selfish or immoral. There was much less understanding that the pain it would inflict could so far exceed the intended benefits. We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is.

We have - I hope - now internalized as a country how wrong that viewpoint is.

I'm not sure that we have. The single most important concept of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is the vast, yawning difference between going to war primarily to stop one organized government from attacking another and going to war to effect regime change on a country. The former is very easy to do with a powerful professional military and the latter is effectively impossible. I don't think the difference has sunk in for most Americans.

The big difference is that there was a very effective disinformation campaign that led the world to believe that Saddam had WMDs and might use them. In the post 9/11 times, many countries believe this was sufficient to justify the war and a coalition was built. It took a good while to know for sure that there were no WMDs... oops. So ya the war was wrong and dumb and we should have had more and better info to justify it before invading but didn't seems so clear at the time. Plus Saddam was a dictator and had very few friends so nobody was too bothered.

> Saddam had WMDs and might use them

Saddam is known to have had chemical weapons, the line between which and "true WMDs" is pretty thin, if it exists at all.

I don't think that there's much of a "disinformation" campaign here if the New York Times (as well as a third-party international organization) repeatedly documented the existence of said weapons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/world/middleeast/question...

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousand...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middlee...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...

Russia had signed several treaties with Ukraine, of note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements. Russia invading Ukraine despite these treaties makes it a particularly untrustworthy partner. This is the principal reason Europe is so concerned. That should really make everyone think ...

To my knowledge USA had no treaty with Irak even between the two wars.

Ive heard three different people mention how terrible ukrain is because the people "look just like us" and it makes me sad

its not like sadaam or afganistan didnt have their issues and still do. ukraine culturally is similar to western sensibilities and they havent done anything like invade another country (unlike sadam who invaded iran).

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