By Thomas L. Friedman
May 4, 2003
We are talking about one of the biggest nation-building projects the U.S. has ever undertaken, the mother of all long hauls. We now have a 51st state of 23 million people. We just adopted a baby called Baghdad -- and this is no time for the parents to get a divorce.
There was a lot of this type of discourse at the time. Libs have no memory.
Apparently he let one of those "Vax gave my child autism" films play at his film festival. He also owns a lot of restaurants and real-estate. He's a capitalist pig.
Rhetoric aside though, since Iraq isn't sending 2 Senators to Congress, I would have gone with the route of
"No, we just installed a friendlier government with a constitution we wrote, totally different"
Lots of parts of the American empire don't get to send senators, like Puerto Rico and DC. Iraq is brown enough that even if we had annexed it officially we'd have done so in a nonvoting kind of way
They do actually send Senators, but they don't vote. I think that it would be harder in the present day (maybe less so now with the number of reactionary judges, but American judicial precedent had been trending since the 60s to be more democratic and free for people until the 90s) to pull off another American Samoa.
I say this because there are Trump-appointee judges reviving long-defunct legal precedents to support their ideological crusade to reshape America from some semblance of a liberal democracy into a fascist dictatorship – citing decisions upholding the Japanese Exclusion Act to uphold laws like Florida's that ban Chinese people from buying property.
They do actually send Senators, but they don't vote.
That absolutely does not count. Nonvoting Senators are not Senators.
It's still factually different from not sending Senators at all, which is all I'm saying.
It is? In one situation, a Senator is sent. The other, one is not. Therefore, factually different.
Things being immoral or wrong ≠ things being untrue
PR does not send senators, not even non-voting ones. they have a single nonvoting rep in the house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_commissioner_of_Puerto_Rico
edited, I guess DC does send non-voting senators
Right, I think I said Senators because I thought it was the same as DC. Not that a non-voting representative or senator matters either way – but the fact that you pointed it out should demonstrate that I wasn't unreasonable for pointing out the initial difference in the US not actually annexing Iraq (although I fully believe that ~90 years earlier, the US probably would have pulled a Philippines, but I think that the UN, especially as more former colonies joined, caused superpowers to engage in more proxy wars over outright wars over who owns the dirt).
A more honest and direct rhetorical shortcut would be "we're turning Iraq into another Japan". US written constitution, controlled friendly government, military occupation. The works.
Wow, factually accurate rhetoric that still effectively conveys why something is wrong? Nothing like proving someone doesn't need to rely on oversimplistic hyperbole to make a point.
See also McCain's "100 years in Iraq" comment in the 2008 election. Had things gone differently we would have happily made it our British Raj.
He said that in two thousand fucking eight McCain just loved killing foreigners so much
"As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it's fine with me"
Ah but you see, Russia is bad and we are good. Even if we are doing the same things, we are doing it because we're good and they're doing it because they're bad. Silly tankies.
Ukraine is a democracy
The kind of democracy that only holds elections if someone pays them to.
Never forget Poroshenko banned the Communist party, and Zelensky banned the Socialist party. Citing that both were merely Russian puppets. Meanwhile both presidents allowed the fascist "territorial defense units" that ethnically cleanse roma, etc. to either keep existing, or just reconstitute themselves under new names (oldest trick in the book).
Democracy is when you ban opposition parties
And the more opposition parties you ban the more democracy it is
Genocide (noun): derived from the Greek root Geno, meaning bad and Cide, meaning thing
US's wars are totally different than what Russia is doing
Yes, actually. Just in the opposite direction as suggested in the screenshots. Libs aren't ready for that, but yes.
We're talking about a country that's been at war for over 90% of its history since 1776, versus a country that, for a long time, was the wet dream of US foreign policy. America welcomed the Russian federation into existence. America loved the Russian federation because it meant the end of the Soviet union. The fact that Russia went from "welcome to the democratic free world" to Enemy Number 1 in two decades is more a matter of NATO needing new regions to destabilize, balkanize, and loot, and less a matter of Russia being "just as imperialist as" The United States. Russia's crime wasn't imperialism. Russia's crime was freezing the liberalization of its economy and refusing to let Yeltsin-style privatization continue at the same speed it had in the 1990s. Russia could have been imperialist 930242903490 times and the United States would have been OK with it as long as Russia was doing imperialism with weapons they bought from Lockheed Martin. After all, the US had no qualms about what Saudi Arabia did to Yemen.
Russia is a reactionary bourgeois nation, but they're also a 2nd world nation. They're hollowed out. They're poor. They're hounded by sanctions. They got kicked off the UN security council. (wrong; see below) Most of the wars they've waged since 1980s (Afghanistan when they were still USSR, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine) were proxy wars at their borders that they were baited into because a certain Globe-spanning empire was arming violent reactionaries and terrorists in the region in order to destabilize it.
Ukraine is a country that has close historical ties to Russia, a country that borders Russia, a country full of people who speak a language very similar to Russian, use the same Cyrillic alphabet as Russian, and formerly were part of one nation (The USSR, and before that, the Russian Empire), a country that had about half of its current land granted to it by Vladimir Lenin (Donbass), Joseph Stalin (Lviv), and Nikita Khruschev (Crimea).
It is absurd to suggest that Russia assisting separatists in Ukraine is the same as the USA killing random civilians in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, having aircraft carriers in the South China sea, torture dungeons on Cuban soil, etc.
a country full of people who speak a language very similar to Russian,
More than that, a large number speak Russian as their first language!
lol I know but didn't want to a complicate a sentence that already had too many clauses and parenthetical asides, but yes, that is a very important point
a country that, for a long time, was the wet dream of US foreign policy. America welcomed the Russian federation into existence. America loved the Russian federation because it meant the end of the Soviet union.
I occasionally think about what an alternate universe would be like where Russia was allowed to join NATO after the dissolution of the USSR. a world where maybe China was as ascendant as it is today and so scared NATO enough to allow Russia in.
None of Russia's actions in the decades since the 90s are particularly egregious when compared directly to what NATO countries have done everywhere in the world. Their actions in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria are really not that much different than what the US did in Iraq/Afghanistan, parts of South America, and Libya. There probably exists a parallel universe where Russian troops are sitting in Coalition FOBs in Iraq alongside American troops, and nobody is shredding them for foreign actions (this isn't said wistfully, mind, just a thought). Ideology unfortunately just couldn't leave Russia alone.
There probably exists a parallel universe where Russian troops are sitting in Coalition FOBs in Iraq alongside American troops, and nobody is shredding them for foreign actions
If I remember correctly, Putin offered George W. Bush search and rescue missions for the war on terror, but wasn't ready to commit troops. Ukraine however, committed 5000 troops to the NATO coalition in Iraq. That's how long Ukraine has been courting NATO for nothing in return.
Didn't the US get a UN Security Council resolution to make it "legal" or am I mixing up my Gulf Wars?
Gulf 1 and Afghanistan got it. Iraq got nixed by the Security council, so it was "The Coalition of the Willing"
It's come back to me now. Suddenly remembering discussions my parents were having when I was a kid about how "we almost got Bin Laden but Bush needed to show up Daddy with the 2nd Gulf War".
Damn, its been a while since someone said that in reference to something I said. I'm old enough now that I can't get student discounts anymore just based on looks.
it was really stupid the taliban would have handed over bin laden they were just fishing for a bribe by acting reluctant. You have to understand that the taliban didn't understand that the Americans actually cared about 9/11 having just fought a war with the soviets in which 100,000 to a million or so afghans died you can see why 3000 people dying didn't to them seem like anything out of the ordinary
Unless they are not being a liberal and not pretending that the conflict started in 2022 (so maybe you can count Crimea). Technically they are creating the LNR and DNR, so it is similar to Iraq as they are installing a friendly puppet governments. So, even beyond the fact that the line is "invasions and wars of aggression are bad, but here is some distinction I came up with so that Russia is irredeemably bad, while the US made an unfortunate mistake", it does not even stand up on their own logic.
I don't think this person knows what genocide means or even has a clear idea
also one side in this war has a stated intention of removing an ethnic group and it isn't the Russians
I think it's because this person just knows to call enemies genocidal because if they aren't genocidal calling them hitler and comparing it to ww2 doesn't work
•
US soldier describing the crimes they committed in Vietnam
If you think it magically changed between then and now you're an idiot. It's the same military, if not worse because they're even less accountable today with a media that is significantly more captured. They simply indiscriminately kill whoever they feel like killing, whenever they feel like it. Anything bad is covered up except in rare cases where they can not. There's a damn reason they went after wikileaks as hard as they did for exposing exactly this kind of thing occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The difference is material: one nation's wars provides the promise of treats to the end user in the treat nation, the other one does not.
You know how Russia has been involved in conflicts where NATO has tried to advance into strategic locations on Russia's border? Those are actually worse than the US invading Iraq.
there was a fund set up to contain all the revenue from iraqi oil for the period of the occupation this fund had billions paid into it. By the time it was handed over it contained something like 30 cents no one knows where the money went but it's reasonable to assume someone made money from the occupation