> You forgot the Irak war and Afghanistan and the fake WMDs

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.

> 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.

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).

> 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.

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.

There were huge protests for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"had 10 years to get ready decided that it was better to keep building diesel engines than invest in EVs". I actually think EU has no chance to compete with China on manufacturing. The energy is too expensive and taxes are too big. Maybe if they had built 100 nuclear plants (with the money they paid Putin in a year) they would have had a chance.

> 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.

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.