yeah but they never annexed any land, so it’s ok or something
Yep, it’s all good as long as land wasn’t annexed
What do you mean? Israel is the 51st state, and Saudi Arabia was going to become the 52nd before they became tankies
A long time ago somebody linked me to a whole bunch of pictures and video from the invasion, and it was…Barbarossa-type shit. The image of the grinning American trooper hoisting his flamethrower in front of someone’s doomed farm, while not gory, is it’s own kind of horrifying. I highly recommend the article What I saw in Fallujah. It’s tough to read but necessary, from someone who was there on the ground and outside the purview of official media.
CW war crimes, mass human suffering
From the article:
The military was maintaining a strict cordon around most of Fallujah. As I could not enter the city, I set out to interview doctors and patients who had fled and were presently working in various hospitals around Baghdad. While visiting Yarmouk Hospital looking for more information about Fallujah, I came across several children from areas south of Baghdad. One of these was a 12-year-old girl, Fatima Harouz, from Latifiya. She lay dazed in a crowded hospital room, limply waving her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, were both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet. Her mother told us, “They attacked our home, and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.”
Victims’ testament
Fatima’s uncle was shot and killed, his wife had been wounded, and their home was ransacked by soldiers. “Before they left, they killed all our chickens.” A doctor who was with us looked at me and asked, “This is the freedom. In their Disneyland are there kids just like this?”
Another young woman, Rana Obeidy, had been walking home in Baghdad with her brother two nights earlier. She assumed the soldiers had shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. She had a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, but had struck her little brother and killed him. In another room, a small boy from Fallujah lay on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade thrown into his home by a US soldier had entered his body through his back and was implanted near his kidney. An operation had successfully removed the shrapnel, but his father had been killed by what his mother described as “the haphazard shooting of the Americans”. The boy, Amin, lay in his bed vacillating between crying with pain and playing with his toy car.
Later, I found myself at a small but busy supply centre in Baghdad set up to distribute goods to refugees from Fallujah. Standing in an old, one-storey building that used to be a vegetable market, I watched as people walked around wearily to obtain basic foodstuffs, blankets or information about housing. “They kicked all the journalists out of Fallujah so they could do whatever they want,” said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who had escaped from Fallujah three days before. “The first thing they did was bomb the hospitals because that is where the wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people are in the street and the soldiers are rolling their tanks over them. This happened so many times. What you see on the TV is nothing. That is just one camera. What you cannot see is much more.”
There were also stories of soldiers not discriminating between civilians and resistance fighters. Another man, Abdul Razaq Ismail, had arrived from Fallujah one week earlier and had been helping with the distribution of supplies to other refugees, having received similar help himself. Loading a box with blankets to send to a refugee camp, he said, “There are dead bodies on the ground and nobody can bury them. The Americans are dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling some bodies with tanks and leaving them at the soccer stadium.” Another man sat nearby nodding his head. He couldn’t stop crying. After a while, he said he wanted to talk to us. “They bombed my neighbourhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from under them.”
Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man in a torn shirt and dusty pants, told of how he escaped with his family, just the day before, while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, killing his cousin. “They used these weird bombs that first put up smoke in a cloud, and then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burned for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours.”
This was the first time I had heard a refugee describing the use of white phosphorous incendiary weapons by the US military, fired from artillery into Fallujah. Though it is not technically a banned weapon, it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use white phosphorous in an area where civilians may be hit. I heard similar descriptions in the coming days and weeks, both from refugees and doctors who had fled the city.
Several doctors I interviewed had told me they had been instructed by the interim government not to speak to any journalists about the patients they were receiving from Fallujah. A few of them told me they had even been instructed by the Shia-controlled Ministry of Health not to accept patients from Fallujah.
It would seem insane to me that none of these people ever went to the Hague if I didn’t know that the US has already threatened to bomb it. As a kid I used to think international law was some solemn thing, now I see It’s a comedy
Fun fact: the Hague Invasion Act was signed in August of 2002
I’m waiting for fantasy movies about hunting down USA vets for their crimes like they make fantasy media about hunting down Nazi Germans.
Fucking shameful. I’m sorry world. Please know that many in the US condemn these wars, but there is very little we can do about them.
By the standards of Reddit, we are all guilty for failing to overthrow the governing class and US citizens deserve to be bombed
I for one agree
At this point we’re really straining not to make excuses for the lack of terror
Don’t be sorry. I was born in Russia, living in the US. You can love your country without supporting the government. You’re not responsible for what your government is doing if you don’t have any way to stop it. Just speak out when you can.
I neither love America nor the government. Our culture is a disease, our cities need to be razed or entirely redesigned, and our land needs to be returned to natives, to Mexico, and to the descendants of slaves.
Our entire society is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.
There is an American culture of world-historical importance. It’s just not the white culture. Black music for instance has unparalleled influence partl because of its quality. White music culture has made no contributions to modern (including popular art) equal to, say, Jazz, Blues, Gospel, RnB, Hip-Hop, detroit techno, chicago house…I could go on. Of course white people in general, especially the bourgeois, have little to no access to or knowedge of these cultures, unless its been given to them through a gentrified, fetishized filter that doesn’t understand the value of these musical traditions. Alternatively they treat is as jokey party music for them to sniff coke to.
Apart from that I agree that the mainstream of American culture is literal proof of the decadence of a civilization.
I’d also say that apart from key land needing to be returned to give to native americans and key minorities, the most important thing is that there is equitable land and housing reform that ensures an equitable distribution and standard of living for everyone in the broader working class, though this doesn’t preclude certain groups being given more immediate priority.
But yeh America is satanic. Literal Mammon worshipers.
Yeah you got it. American white bourgeois society is a virus. And you’re right, all the unique music that came out of the USA is a product of oppressed minorities. Even pasty white conservative country music is a perverse mockery of southern/appalachian folk music that has roots in African and Celtic traditions. The banjo is an African instrument for instance.
White suburbs are a genuine blight and their expansion is cooking the planet.
Too true. There are some nations worth appreciating, if that’s how you see the world, but every holdover from the American colonial project(s) is illegimate in comparison and barely has what you could call a “national identity” (nor should they)
Lol ok bud.
“Please love America” -Russian guy
Living in Russia I was told that US is the mortal enemy and everything is their fault. Living in the US I’ve learned that it’s actually Russia that is evil and Russians can’t be trusted.
It’s all bullshit. All major governments are playing their own game and citizens are just disposable pawns in that game. Hating each other because of where on the map we were born is just playing into that game. I love and miss my “motherland”. But my motherland is under siege and I can’t go back. The US is far from perfect, but if I still lived in Russia I’d be in jail or worse simply for what I’ve posted so far on Lemmy. Also, since I moved I’ve seen Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden as the president. In the old country it’s been Putin, Putin, Medvedev (Putin), and Putin.
US isn’t “good”. But it is better.
nope. sorry, but your motherland hasn’t been responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the USA. You think that having a different president means that there is some sort of functional democratic process that represents the people of the US? That is farcical. Sure, it might suck to be in russia and you could go to jail for the things you have said, but Russia is what it is today because of the US’s antagonism towards the soviet union and russia in particular. Russia as it exists now is a consequence of US involvement.. The US ruling-class doesn’t care about democracy or freedom in Russia. The soviet union had its contradictions and problems, but a lot of the soviet union’s problems were the direct result of US meddling. The US has been quite open about that, from its invasion in 1918 to its arming of right-wing extremists with the goal of killing as many soviets as possible. But working people in the US never really decided any of that, because the US government does not have either the form or the function of a governance body that represents working-peoples interests.
Just because you live in the US now, and your life might be better now, doesn’t mean that the US government isn’t the worlds villain… It is no matter how nice you have it there. You can check in with the millions of dead in southeast asia, or the millions dead and displaced in the middle east.
Oh fuck off with that. We could sit here all day copying and pasting Wikipedia articles about crimes against humanity committed by both nations. My life is better here. It probably could be even better somewhere else, but it’s not like moving countries is something people can easily do. You want the world to have a clear constant villain but that’s not how that works. US commuted genocides, Russia/USSR sure as shit did, same with China now. Every country has committed some kind of an atrocity in the recent past. It doesn’t meant that they can be forgiven, forgotten, or excused. All I’m saying is that neither the Russian or the American governments represent the people. It’s just that the foundation of America was built in individualism. And because of that the individual still have more rights and freedoms then in Russia.
idk, i think you missed the point of the things i linked. Two of them were the president of the US knowingly endorsing Yeltsin’s extralegal seizure of power (the second was his approval of Yeltsin and support after Yeltsin shelled Russian parliament for “going communist” … Those lost two article weren’t just to show the crimes of the USA, it was to show that the United States doesn’t give a fuck about democracy or russia, they gave more evidence of the US purposefully interfering in Soviet/Russian affairs in order to harm the Soviet/Russian people. Russia exists as it does today as a consequence of US foreign policy.
I still stand by what I said. The Soviet Union/Russia and the PRC have never come anywhere close to crimes of the US government. In my lifetime, the US has invaded and committed war crimes, or undermined democracy, in dozens of countries… The same cannot be said of any other country in the same timeframe
If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.
It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.
The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.
If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.
You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.
I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.
Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.
Thank you for sharing your opinion despite the constant pressure of tankies here.
constant pressure of tankies
This word has lost all its meaning
It was worse on Reddit.
Living in the US I’ve learned that it’s actually Russia that is evil and Russians can’t be trusted.
How does it feel to support a country that sees you as subhuman, vlad?
5 million dead buddy. You can’t nationalism that away unless you think brown people are subhuman.
Russians can’t be trusted
See how racist listening to americans makes you? You’re a “Russian orc” buddy, the slava ukrani brunch ghouls will never accept you, stop embarassing yourself.
Ok bud.
Why would I love my country? The only thing it has provided me is money and relative comfort at the expense of millions and millions of deaths and millions and millions of people who are likely permanently traumatized and homeless. And please don’t say “you have the freedom to talk shit.” In Russia you get black bagged to Siberia for protesting against war. In the US the government will make you think your little dance and song protests will usher in communism to make you feel powerful and think you’re changing the world, then nothing changes and you get bored. It’s jester’s privilege.
Just put your head down, make a bunch of money, waste food, consume product, support the next war, and don’t ask questions.
Fuck communism. It ruined my home.
how old are you?
30s
Ok vlad, you seem like the diaspora joe archetype. Its an archetype of people from non-north american (can be expanded to non-western) countries that get indoctrinated by treat ideology and now worship their states. You were probably raised by ex-soviet stem types?
We ruined your home idiot, and we did it for money.
You’re the type who’d rather spend the rest of life in his rocking chair, shaking a finger and warning the youths about the dangers of change bc you once had a negative brush with it. Kindly sit down.
You’re the kind that does shit without thinking, just because you want to do “something”.
That’s a big assumption
Back at ya
Boo hoo nothing we can do. Why even try amiright? /s
But they achieved all their objectives so well! /s
W raised the banner saying “Mission Accomplished” what more do you want? Jeez.
I want a president to land a jet on a freaking aircraft carrier!!!
didn’t libya got turned into a slave trading nation, lol?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/Ix-AMYos0Js?t=110
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
But we defeated the Taliban and turned Afghanistan into a thriving democracy, right? Right??
Inevitably with the passage of time you move on to other topics and while this is happening you focus on narrower more specific effects. But this is so damn infuriating because it’s exactly what EVERYBODY SAID WOULD HAPPEN. Early 2000s when these American wars of adventure started you had people saying this would be destabilising, encourage the very terror supposedly being fought against, cost the US themselves mountains of treasure, degrade their reputation and put them on a path of decline. In the lead up to Iraq many warned that this would be destabilising for the whole world as well as the nation of Iraq itself, that it would make things more dangerous globally, create power vacuums and breed generations of resentment and hatred and it clearly has. This is not to even mention on top of it all, the absolute monumental human tragedy it has wrought. This was stupid, stupid, stupid decision making.
Sorry, can’t hear you over the sound of all this cheap oil, I mean, freedom! Bringing freedom to these rich oil, I mean freedom starved countries! - 'murica in the 2000s
Thing is, the USA has been pulling this kind of shit for a long time. The Kingdom of Hawaii being overthrown is a very good and old example, dating back to 1893 for the coup and 1898 for the incorporation. The Philippines being denied their independence for almost 50 years after the Spanish sold them out in 1898 is another example. The USA is an unrepenting reoffender when it comes to fucking other countries.
And it was less “stumbling into iraq cause we have no clue what we’re doing” and more “If Halliburton and Raytheon make enough money off of all this they’ll donate enough to my staffers and I that we can all customize our cadillacs” (I recommend season 1 of the podcast Blowback if you wanna take a deeper dive)
This article is one sided. Doesn’t discuss any of the economic benefits of these actions. Only communist things like megadeaths and habitat destruction.
My Poe detector just exploded.
Shit, they gave me a phony Hitler Particle Detector. This yank knockoff only picks up satire
Also you just know they used some covid style math where everyone who pulled a muscle farting the wrong way is counted as a Iraq war related death. Also doesn’t account for all the deaths prevented by showing the rest of the planet what happens if Raytheon wants to test a new weapon system with near peer, red team targets in realistic testing condition while the CIA decides the collapse of your state would shift the balance of power in your region in a way beneficial to Murica.
deaths prevented by showing the rest of the planet what happens if Raytheon wants to test a new weapon system
Thank you! Where does it discuss all of the lives saved by Raytheon?
Watch this documentary https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eAvudWqnPfM
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Also doesn’t account for all the deaths prevented by showing the rest of the planet what happens if Raytheon wants to test a new weapon system
All of that as revenge for the death of 2977 victims…
All of that as revenge for Saddam Hussein humiliating an insecure cowboy’s daddy, let’s be honest here.
Don’t forget he used the chemical weapons we sold him to use against Iran against Iran in the 80s.
Pretty sure the US wouldn’t have went to Afghanistan if it wasn’t for 911… It’s this the new thing? Ignoring the invasion of Afghanistan? It’s the second time since I’m on Lemmy that I see people acting like that never happened…
I think most Americans still consider Afghanistan justified, but recognize Iraq as a mistake based on lies. It’s not that they ignore it, it’s just easier to swallow.
Terrorist financed by Saudi Arabia found and killed in Pakistan -> Afghanistan was justified and totally not based on lies!
Not only that, the number of innocent civilians killed by the American forces was totally disproportionate to the American loss.
0.15% of their population vs 0.001% for the US.
Of course. A calculated, targeted attack would have been too effective and wouldn’t generate enough profit for the defense industry. Lucky they pissed off Afghanistan in 1998 with Operation Infinite Reach or the Taliban might have turned him over years before 9/11. That’s just bad business.
9/11 was a coincidence as they were already planning the invasion of Iraq months before this event because Saddam announced that he would trade petrol with EUR instead of USD.
Yeah, I remember them trying to first pin 9/11 on Saddam before it was confirmed to be Al Queda. It was weird. And then of course the made up WMD stuff.
Whoah whoah whoah. The dollar is perfectly green and any association with oil or bombs is purely coincidental. /s
Are we just going to ignore the innocent people that died in Afghanistan?
Noone with power gives a shit about life of a average US citizen.
This has been always about military industrial complex. Currently US spends 186.6 billion dollars a year to combat terrorism. Which means unless US is fighting something, somewhere they are losing money and they can’t have that.
“Rather than teasing apart who, what, or when is to blame, this report shows that the post-9/11 wars are implicated in many kinds of deaths, making clear that the impacts of war’s ongoing violence are so vast and complex that they are unquantifiable.”
Did this writer or anyone in this thread actually read the paper?
It basically repeatedly says every few paragraphs that the numbers quoted are only tip of the iceberg of suffering.
Tell us, what do YOU think this is saying?
It doesn’t matter how complicated shit got, the US still kicked everything off.
So you’re telling me the military that actually furthered climate change due to its wars aren’t the main cause of death and suffering after leading (and currently leading) the “war on terror” on a bunch of irrelevant countries and spreading terrorism and extremism?
🎼 'Cause I’m proud to be an American 🎵🎶🇺🇲🦅
Look I’m not one to say American invasion was right in any way, but this is a bit of a misleading in title. Most sources in the article reference indirect deaths. If we quantified everything in indirect deaths, death tolls across the board would be inflated in the same proportion. I think it important to keep in mind the U.S. wasn’t fuckin digging mass graves over there. The stated number would mean we would need to kill around 600 people a day for 20+ years. No amount of media corruption in the world could coverup that many deaths. I’ve known and do know people who were natives that served as translators during the war, that’s not how they tell it.
Bush should be in jail for Iraq.
Regarding Afghanistan, we should have focused exclusively on counter-insurgency and let the Loya Jirga do its thing without US interference.
