this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Here is the UN mandate to intervene in Lybia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1973 a resolution drafted by Tunisia and supported by the African Union, the Arab League and allowed by all of the UNSC.
Where is russia's UN mandate to annex Crimea and to later bomb Kiev? Did they even try?
The Lybian war was started on lies and shattered the country so I don't care if it was "legal". Diplomatic routes in Ukraine were tried (e.g. the Minsk Agreements) but broken by Kiev. The Crimean people overwhelmingly supported the annexation.
That's all lies again too, man, but this time russia is arresting or killing anyone who dares to tell the truth.
Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, once you've invaded a territory it's hard to assess, but it's a fact that they violated Ukraine's borders to add to their territory twice now.
International law matters here, because invading parts of other countries leads us back to 1914: you sacrifice the peasantry and treasury, but the "empire" is rewarded with territory gains for the history books, this influences military calculus so that wars become more likely if the trend catches on.
You are not free to speak your mind in russia and the government has not earned a reputation for telling the truth at any point since 2014.
Only EXTREMELY selectively
Because you don't think international law matters when your side breaks multiple international treaties
You don't think international law matters when your side is committing genocide.
You only think it matters when the guys who stole Hillary's election (they didn't) are the bad guys on CNN
It only matters when someone you call an enemy reacts to all of your international law breaking
You don't give a shit about international law. It's just convenient ammo to argue for what you want sometimes.
honestly i appreciate you attempting to engage this - truthfully, i find the entire premise of appealing to morality in a war fruitless, and my intentions in making the statement above was to imitate that this is a effect that has been repeated for many generations (whether or not it is true).
ultimately people do things to advance their own goals & stamp out contradictions, not on the basis of morality.
this attempt to say this is moral and that isn't could go on until the next generation of soldiers is born - and it would be pointless because the narrative accepted will often be the media machine with the biggest wallet until some massive contradiction.
ultimately what are your goals here, what are the perspective of the shoes of the russians and the ukrainians, what is the context etc.
perhaps it's as simply resolved as the issue of the jupiter missles, or perhaps peace was never going to be a option(from your stance of the "russian imperialists" or my stance that the American west desire to remain a world power).
truthfully i am of the opinion the americans seeks to remain a world power [hence the 800 military bases around the world vs the russians 21], and will take advantage of any conflict to pose as the morally high ground in a "just war", or proxy war in this case.
i don't think peace was ever an option, russia most likely sees ukraine as a staging ground for nato as it did in operation Barbarossa, or napoleon, or seeks minerals, or believes the new government is too nationalist for their own taste (why does it have to be one point?)
all that matters is that is a war to extinguish contradictions that pose existential threats, another form of competition for capital.
I did not appeal to morality, I stated the fact that the decision to helping the rebels in Lybia took into account every regional player given what we knew at the time. And even in that case it was counterproductive in hindsight.
Following international law is not about morality, it's about being able to vaguely know what you can count on and possible consequences when you perform a military calculation or a geopolitical move.
If everyone just takes what they can get away with regardless of others' interests, the future will just be a series of Iraq and Ukraine wars all over the world, particularly in Africa, Europe and Asia.
Russia decided to help the rebels in Ukraine because they were being targeted for ethnic cleansing and asked for help explicitly
i acknowledge this, i have no desire to struggle for the trough.
to follow law and order for the sake of law and order, you will find these rules tend to favour the well established, powerful and often rich governments. just like it once was deemed that to attack kings was deem sinful for they conversed with god. the rich and powerful will write laws that benefit them, while maneuvering around them with ease to cripple/destroy their enemies/threats.
the material reality on ground matters immensely, and we the west seek to capitalize on this opportunity (in the ukraine) to liquidate our enemies where ever, whenever possible.
my friend, we will live to see many more wars, there are contradictions grander than this, (see ipcc report) - and i assure you, we will be portrayed as the good guys, with hollywood movies on how our soldiers going overseas to do these wars made us feel sad.
Libya today is a haven for islamic terrorism and slaver markets. Regardless of the "legality" of the NATO (mostly french and US led) intervention, it threw the entire region in outright chaos, and was enormously damaging to the working class of Lybia, but also of the entire fucking Sahel.
Yea, in hindsight it would have been better to just let him crack down on the population to keep stability in the region, but with the information we had at the time, most African and Arab neighbours agreed that helping the rebels with a no-fly zond would be better than not to, since the civil war was going to start anyway. You don't care about legality, but that is not the point. The point is that this was not unilateral, like Iraq, and even then military interventions can go terribly wrong.