I get the irony and everything, but it is possible to have opposed the Iraq War while supporting the Ukraine War, which is a case of Ukrainians fighting back against an unprovoked invasion. Right?
For that matter, it's entirely possible to have supported both. Or opposed both. The only combination that would make me shake my head is supporting the Iraq War but opposing the Ukraine War. Unless you're Russian or something.
First major vacation in five years - in Paris, no less - & this is uppermost on his mind. Can't imagine spring in Paris being that disappointing.
You specialize in raining on people's parades? What a sad life that must be.
"Unless you're Russian or something."
Like "MAGAt Republican".....
Hey Kevin
Why don't you REALLY take a few days off?
If I were IN-Seine, like you are, I know I wouldn't be thinking about posting anything
Too slow to catch a particular city's info on the NHK channel, I searched after posting, found it was 63°F & raining in Paris then. Don't know why the man seems to think he owes us - his blog is free, & aside from his sister in California possibly alienating the cats' affection, he & Marian could at least be inside a cafe or patisserie enjoying something delicious & making plans for later.
Don't know why the man seems to think he owes us - his blog is free,
To me it doesn't seem like he thinks he owes us. I think it seems like he enjoys blogging.
That's what the weather is doing here, too. See how much money I've saved!
Maybe he *enjoys* blogging. And three minutes' worth of writing while you're luxuriating over croissant and cafe americain doesn't sound like hard duty.
Or relaxing in your hotel room after walking your feet off.
The construction here seems an odd one.
So far as I can tell, the question of "support" is not a question about "war", but about supporting aggression. Your phrasing seems to compare supporting an invasion with "supporting" defense against an invasion.
Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to oppose an unjustified invasion of a sovereign state (the US invasion of Iraq) while also supporting a defense against an unjustified invasion (the Russian invasion of Ukraine). It would be similarly reasonable to oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine while supporting the Iraqi self-defense against that invasion.
But of course this is not what the majority of those who "opposed the Iraq War" actually 'opposed'. They opposed (while those who "supported the Iraq War" supported) the unjustified attack, not the Iraqi self-defense.
Where the reasonableness begins to break down is when someone supports one party's act of self-defense while opposing that of another party, or supports one party's unjustified aggression while opposing that of another party.
<Awkward wording but I knew what he meant: support for helping Ukraine defend itself.
A more substantive critique would be: the above can mean a lot of different things: military aid (if so how much, and any strings attached); economic aid (ditto), no fly zone (I hope to God not but there are people who think this is a good idea), various types of economic warfare against Russia, Nato expansion, and so on. Some of us support all of these things. Some of us support some of them.
Is there anyone outside of Russia who supported the US starting the Iraq War, but opposes US support of Ukraine? I suppose there are some cynical Republicans, but they'd probably support a foreign invasion of the US if it looked like it would hurt Biden.
Andrew Sullivan, I think, comes pretty close.
Rand Paul, Marjorie Taylor Greene . . .
Paul opposed Iraq,
Big if true.
a bunch of winger republicans. tucker. greenwald.
Greenwald supported the Iraq invasion?
yup, even though he now denies it. but he wasn't writing publicly at the time. however from his own book:
"Despite these doubts, concerns, and grounds for ambivalence, I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country."
That's interesting. Thanks.
I don't think Greenwald is quite right-wing.
Is Greenwald's confused values driven by a sense of persecution; or has he naturally evolved, by inner tendencies, towards absolutism in free speech; or is he just an asshole whose values are all over the place because he is intellectually lazy; or...?
I've always viewed GG as a hard-right libertarian who occasionally sounds like a civil libertarian.
And his short career as a lawyer was a joke.
Glemm & KKKlay Travis should go into practice together for the benefit of the CANCELLED.
Greenwald is a hard socialist-leftist who (like a lot of such people) reserves his most intense hatred for the insufficiently left (that is, liberals). The focus of his particular ire is that embodiment of contemporary American liberalism, the Democratic Party.
This mindset has led him to increasingly make common cause with the MAGA right in America. And at this point I think it's an open question whether or not he's approaching the point where he's actually morphed into a true right-winger himself, in his heart of hearts. It certainly seems that way at times.
Tucker Carlson is the obvious choice. About a quarter of today's republican party support the Russians since Trump is a big fan of dictators.
Of course it is "possible" to support or oppose any human activity. Opinions are like nose hairs: everybody's got 'em.
But it seems easy to me to have opposed the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq, which was done to control Iraq's oil, and to also oppose Russia's invasion and military occupation of Ukraine, which is being done in part to control Ukraine's coal and natural gas. Both were/are elective wars of aggression. Neither were justified on moral or ethical grounds.
Just say what you mean: People ought to have a full understanding of Thomas Aquinas' "just war" theory as a first pass of defining one's values and position on war.
I opposed Dubya's Folly and I oppose Putin's. I see some connections between the two.
It was the US invasion of Iraq that paved the way for Putin's invasion of Ukraine. When the US went ahead with the invasion after failing to gain the support of the UN Security Council, it established that large, nuclear-armed states can do whatever they want.
Also, the US wasn't terribly concerned with the territorial integrity of sovereign nations when Iraq tried to seize the western half of Iran in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. Saddam was our buddy and we supported Iraq with money, weapons, military intelligence, and dual-use technology exports. Some aggressions are more acceptable than others.
None of this justifies Putin's aggression, but the flagrant hypocrisy of the US isn't lost on the people who live in the Global South and that probably explains why many non-Western nations are ambivalent about this war.
Well said.
Apparently some part of Bush’s brain agrees with your assessment.
GWB is one seriously messed-up individual. Confusing Ukraine and Iraq was perhaps a Freudian slip, but his attempt to laugh it away with a joke reminded me of that time at the Radio and TV Correspondent's Dinner in 2004 when he joked about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The audience's response was even more disturbing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5YgJx8VGRA
What’s really disturbing is that nowadays I long for the time when Republicans were more like Bush. It’s kind of like that old joke where a guy with the world’s worst breath goes to the Dr. And the Dr. tells him that it’s so bad that he will have to work his way up in increments. So as a first step he should go home and gargle with shit.
The better example is the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and then Serbia.
No foreign power invaded Yugoslavia, or instigated the independence movements of the former constituent republics. NATO conducted air attacks on Serbia and Serbian forces after the latter had been engaged in hostilities in Kosovo for months, but did not introduce ground forces. So, rather different from Russia’s interventions, infiltration and invasions of Ukraine.
This reminds me of one of my problems with the left during the Second Iraq War. All the signs on lawns declaring "War is Never the Answer". Really? However, I don't suppose I could come up with a snappy, few words way of saying, "Don't go to war under an administration that will obviously say anything to get you to go to war."
ANSWER are the OG Tankies.
As a lefty (who's not always up to speed on The Lefty Orthodoxy of the Moment), I think the distinction between "good" and "bad" war is whether or not the United States has combat troops committed, or possibly is bombing. Then it's unjust by definition.
And yes, I don't always agree with our standard and accepted lefty positions. I thought "Occupy Wall St!!" was dumb, "Defund the Cops!!" insane, and now -- "Laws off my Body!"?? Really? A random slogan generator could do better.
Slogans are hard.
A shorter version of "keep the nanny state out of reproductive choice" would be welcome.
US out of My Uterus.
(H/t theONION, when it was still funny (c. 1997.)
So was WWII a "bad" (i.e. unjust) war because we had ground troops committed?
Pretty much all wars are bad. That's why supporters of any war always liken the situation to World War II. It's the only example they've got in the last 150 years.
Even WWII is a mixed bag. We liberated the concentration camps, but we also dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not arguing it wasn't for the greater good (I don't believe that though), but it was certainly bad from the dead and irradiated people's perspective.
Pearl Harbor was pretty bad for our people. We didn't start it.
Pearl Harbor was no excuse for using the atom bomb. However the human cost of a continuing war and invading Japan would be such an argument. There are those who think the Japanese were on the verge of surrender in any event, but I have my doubts.
My take is the bombing of cities was justified, as horrible as it was. The US tried precision bombing. The British told the Americans it wouldn't work (given the technology of the time). The British were right, and the Americans had to change course. This was a war of national survival.
The most destructive raid of the entire war, I'm pretty sure, was Tokyo, in March 1945. Conventional explosives were used (a version of Napalm, IIRC). Utterly harrowing stuff. Simply barbaric. But barbarism was probably necessary given the enemy's determination to kill as many Americans as possible en route to defeat.
Anyway, needless to say, the people killed in Tokyo are no less a tragedy than those killed in Hiroshima, simply because their deaths were due to electromagnetic instead of the strong force.
But Nagasaki was overkill, I've always believed. Sheer murder.
It is always difficult to capture the context of the time. The Japanese were doing everything they could to emphasize they would never surrender, including turning Iwo Jima and Okinawa into sensrless bloodbaths. Some segments of the Japanese government were negotiating for peace through the Soviets, but of course the Soviets were playing them and kept everything secret while they readied to seize Mongolia. At the time the main concern in the U.S. was not that Nagasaki was overkill, but that it wouldn't be enough.
+1
Sure. We have the benefit of hindsight. They didn't.
I think the bombing of cities in WWII was unjustified in both moral and military terms. I should think the moral aspect is obvious; even in international law, the deliberate targeting of civilians is impermissible. There is little evidence that the destruction of population centers reduces the capacity or will of a nation to continue a war. Germany suffered massive destruction of Hamburg, Dresden, and other cities, but did not surrender until Allied armies were entering Berlin. I grant that the nuclear attacks on Japan may have hastened its surrender, but the case was unique. The Japanese knew that a single aircraft could carry a city-destroying weapon, and had no way of knowing how many more such bombs we had. This was radically new; the raids of the Blitz and those that had destroyed German cities involved hundreds of aircraft and extensive planning, and were sometimes unsuccessful due to weather.
I think the bombing of cities in WWII was unjustified in both moral and military terms. I should think the moral aspect is obvious; even in international law, the deliberate targeting of civilians is impermissible...There is little evidence that the destruction of population centers reduces the capacity or will of a nation to continue a war.
I agree it's morally impermissible to deliberately to kill more of the enemy than is required to defeat him. And that means that it is indeed wrong to target civilians. But factories aren't civilians. And the technology available during WW2 didn't allow a means of targeting the enemy's industrial capacity save by mass bombing of urban areas. US planners maintained precision bombing could be done via its cutting edge bombsight technology. The British, who had been at war for more than two years when the US entered the conflict, told them such a strategy wasn't feasible. The British were correct (not that the Americans didn't try, at considerable cost in US air crew casualties for very little gain). And in any event the factory worker in the Ruhr churning out artillery shells was surely just as legitimate a target as a Wehrmacht officer commanding a tank crew. (Certainly it would've been news to William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln that the enemy's economic base was off limits.)
The contention that targeting the enemy's factories via the air doesn't work likewise doesn't stand up to scrutiny, though this canard has certainly been repeated frequently. For starters German war production did finally begin to decline toward the end of 1944. And the fact that the Reich managed to continue to increase armaments production for the first 30+ months of the Allied air campaign tends to obscure the fact that Germany went to great efforts to mitigate and counter the effectiveness of the Fortresses and Lancasters being hurled at them in huge numbers (both via a large-scale investment in aerial defenses and via a huge, expensive effort to harden the country's factories and disperse production to widely scattered, less vulnerable sites). In other words, we can't visit the parallel universe where no Allied bombing campaign took place, but that universe would certainly feature a Germany that managed higher levels of armaments production—and therefore a stronger, better equipped and more lethal military—than the one that actually lost that war. And needless to say, these same argument apply to Japan—maybe even more so given the vast numbers of added, additional deaths (both Allied and Japanese) that would've occurred had an invasion of the home islands proved necessary.
The Allied raids were designed specifically to cause firestorms in civilian, residential areas, in order to overwhelm firefighting efforts. The US and the UK both conducted research on the optimal mix of high explosives and incendiaries to create the most intense fires, based on the construction of German and Japanese housing structures, not factories. Most of the bomb load was incendiaries. Wikipedia cites sources on this. Was the reduction in output due to damage to factories, or to workers killed or made homeless? I haven’t yet found research on this. It makes a difference in the moral assessment.
You miss the best argument against WWII: we supported the arguably first or second worst dictator ever to defeat the arguably fist or second worst dictator ever. Of course Hitler was the greater threat and in a war one does what one has to do win.
It is incomprehensible to oppose the Ukraine war with any moral justification. They were invaded and defending their country against an army commiting rampant, horrific war crimes led by a sociopathic tyrant.
Speaking of Iraq, in case anyone missed it, in a speech yesterday GW Bush said “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine".
And then the audience laughed. Because it's so funny how we invaded a country based on lies and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Cue the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" theme song, right?!?
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/05/19/george-w-bush-iraq-verbal-slip-lon-orig-tp.cnn
So G.W. got Vladimir Puten and Dick Cheney mixed up. Easy enough mistake to make.
"Unless you're Russian or something." Something menaing a Trump aligned republican a la Tucker Carlson.
I what world are you living Kevin.
Since you are in my native country ask the people around you if they supported the war in Iraq.
Do not forget to visit the Rodin Museum and its park.
Remember "freedom fries" and "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"? The vile directed at France for failing to support Dubya's Debacle was quite intense.
Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, there was a rumor that Saddam and his top lieutenants couldn't be found because the Embassy of France has issued them passports and visas and helped them to escape. One morning, I tuned into NPR and heard them pass on that fact-free rumor and there was glee in the announcer's voice. NPR has been dead to me ever since.
Remember the old joke: "How many troops does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been tried". None of these idiots ever heard of the battle of Verdun and they are trying to tell us about history?
Opposing the Iraq War and supporting the Ukrainians are consistent. In Iraq WE were the Russians. Capiche?
No, we weren't a INTENTIONALLY brutal.....
"as INTENTIONALLY"
Well Iraq was also an unprovoked invasion.
In retrospect, Putin had been identifying his goals of a wider path of conquest to recapture all of the buffer zones -- the "gaps" -- and his tirade of rebuilding the Soviet Union (the greatness of Russia, blah, blah, blah) was the most visible.
This war would not have stopped at Ukraine -- he flat out told us this.
One cannot, in good conscience, oppose this war without accepting that this war would have continued to expand until Putin either met sufficient resistance to stop him or he'd achieved his goals. And even having stopped him, allowing him to keep land that he captured would only delay his plans while he rebuilt and retooled his military and equipment.
That is why this war is of great importance and why the NYT editorial board got it wrong, today. This war has to end with a loser: Putin. His ambitions necessarily involve the realignment of Europe and the world through the use of force and the deaths of millions.
Giving Putin an "out" will not result in the long-term stability of the region.
Agree.
Or Republican.
I think many on the right are simply uninterested in the war in Ukraine because lefties support it. Seeing what Hunter is up to is so much more interesting.
Wrong. Centrists support it. Righties support it. Righties in league with Putin do not. Lefties don't care.
The only bad wars for Democratic liberals are the ones that do not include US arms.
Ronald Reagan's dirty little war in Central America was a bad one.
Isn't it curious that the countries that Ronnie saved from godless communism are now narco-terror states while Nicaragua is relatively stable and peaceful?
WTF? Nicaragua is an unstable authoritarian state, ruled by former revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega and his wife. The only reason it might appear stable tothe uninformed is that he has thrown anyone who opposes him into prison. Ortega is actually seeking to increase support from the US right now, as the Nicraraguan economy sucks and Venezuela and Russia have cut off their aid.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/video/repression-nicaragua-ortega-attacks-opposition-run-election