I smell sarcasm, but still, you're not that wrong. The motivation absolutely matters - US Imperialism is much softer, even in it's war crimes, than Russian Imperialism that comes with genocide bundled. In the former case where it hurts is that they try to paint a rosy picture (freedom and democracy etc.) while committing war crimes / invading left and right for business interests, and that hypocrisy is very annoying. At the same time when the Russians invade, they're brutal, war crimes are part of their process. I'd take the former over the latter any day, even ideally neither should be a thing in the 2020s.
The official motivation in Irak were WMD, eventually revealed to be a complete fabrication by the Bush administration.
The United Nation voted against the war, and the US went anyway, under the pretense there was a link with 9/11, which we know now is BS.
If Russia did this, you would call it what it is: a bunch of greedy bullies that seized the opportunity provided by a terrorist attack to justify the occupation of a sovereign country because it's a military and economic winning move.
But apparently the US gets a pass at being a monster.
The US actively supported death squads, drug trafficking, and dictators in Central America in the 80s. Nothing about what the US did during the Cold War (and realistically the “war on terror”) could even remotely be called “soft”, or for “good intentions”.
Propaganda is when other countries sell a narrative.
Even since the fall of the USSR, Russia was not at war only in 1998 when their economy collapsed in the aftermath of Asian financial crisis and they simply couldn't afford it.
And the list doesn't include covert operations all around the world. For example, Latin America in the 20th century was greatly affected by them, Nicaragua in particular. Deep involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is missing too.
Im saying, that the structure of empire, does not give a damn about the values, it corrupts all, infiltrates all, from the highest king to the lowest peasant, the mindset starts to differ, the values start to differ, the processes start to devolve and dissolve, turning a democratic process of searching for compromise into a partisan war of conquest. The outcome is the same, but one struggles against it and the other embraces it to the fullest as the natural order of things.
The dosage makes a thing a poison, but this beast can not be dosaged, as the lack of self-control is in its very heart.
Well, compared to the alternatives that go around, dressed up in nice propaganda but horrific beneath.. they still kind of are even though heavily deformed by 70 years of empire.
Yes, that's correct. No matter how much US lead wars caused distruction and suffering it was "mostly" collateral damage and naive stupidity that they can change things to their own accord. Russian invasion in Ukraine is pure evil for the sake of showing how evil they are just to scare off the enemy and the future opponents. This is just as barbaric as did Mongols to Slavs, burning entire towns. Next thing after they lose the war I expect them to turn inwards and start murdering their own people a-la Stalin's purges.
> than Russian Imperialism that comes with genocide bundled
The United States has killed well over a quarter million Arab civilians, many of those directly through war crimes, in an ethnically motivated invasion. Explain what isn't genocide about that.
