War Criminals

 

Like liberals, I share a deep hatred for war criminals. And Vladimir Putin is clearly a war criminal.  At least for what he did in Grozny.  That alone is enough to warrant life imprisonment.  But what about his invasion of the Crimea?  Nah.  That should be: The "invasion" of the Crimea.  I'm not even going to discuss why wailing about that is stupid.  It should be self-evident.  If it isn't, then you're too debased to waste my time with.  What about Aleppo? Personally, I'm not so sure about Aleppo.  Yes, indiscriminate bombing killed a lot of innocent people.  But the war itself was started by the United States of America and Saudi Arabia.  And all the crimes of war flow from the first decision to start a war in the first place.  That is what makes a war of choice the supreme war crime.  And the nature of the mercenaries that the USA and Saudi Arabia were employing (deranged, fanatical religious fundamentalists) made defeating them essential for the continued existence of Syria as a functioning state.  For those reasons, whenever I heard about Assad using barrel bombs over neighbourhoods or about the destruction of Aleppo, I restrained my outrage.  Especially after what the USA had only recently done in Iraq, especially in Fallujah.  In its battle against the Jihaadist psychopaths employed by the USA and Saudi Arabia, the Syrian army had suffered horrendous casualties. It is absurd to think that soldiers are going to sacrifice themselves, that they are going to opt for a mode of combat that is highly likely to get them killed, rather than pursue an alternative (such as a bombing campaign) that will spare them.  Even our heroic and virtuous Canadian soldiers in World War Two, during the Battle of Ortona, would toss grendades into rooms before entering them, taking the risk of killing a family sheltering from the violence, to avoid the possibility of being shot by hiding German soldiers.  

And I remembered all of this after the USA did the exact same thing when it re-took the Iraqi city of Mosul back from ISIS soon after it was finished condemning Putin and Assad for Aleppo.  (Again, with the obvious difference that ISIS came out of the deliberate Obama-Biden-Clinton administration's criminal assault on Syria that started that entire mess.)

What of the invasion of the Ukraine itself?  Chris Hedges (and a lot of other respectable and worthy writers) condemns it as a war crime:

Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe and not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia's border, as well as the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.

I still harbour feelings that Putin still had alternatives to war. Not being privy to all the information and not knowing the minutae of all of the diplomatic tools at a world leader's disposal, I'm not totally certain, but I think there were still alternatives to be pursued before deciding on a war that would inevitably kill thousands of innocent people, if not tens or hundreds of thousands.

In recent days though, I've been entertaining some thoughts.  Now, perhaps they come from my deep, burning desire for Putin's cock, or, alternatively, they come from being an adult in a shitty world run by idiots and psychopaths.  If you're an adult, I invite you to continue reading.  If you're a moral child who can never believe that Big Daddy USA could ever do anything wrong, just go back to reading Thomas Friedman or listening to Rachel Maddow or Max Boot or whatever shit-heads feed your infantile worldview.

1.  The USA is actively pursuing what it calls "Full Spectrum Dominance."  There can be no alternative power blocs on the face of the Earth except for itself. 

2.  The USA's oligarchy does not want the best for its own country's citizens, let alone the best interests of the rest of the world's peoples.

3.  The last time that the USA had access to the steering wheel in Russia it was disastrous.

4.  The ultimate goal of the USA's power elite is the breakup of Russia and China to turn the areas under their control into impoverished, Balakanized zones of chaos and poverty (like Iraq and Libya) that can be more easily controlled.

5.  Aside from the provocation of the anti-Russian military alliance NATO absorbing more and more Eastern European countries into it, over the condemnations of Putin, and aside from the possibility that there was no plan to incorporate the Ukraine into NATO (although they would still be coy about it), it is a fact that the USA was building a defacto military alliance with the Ukraine, pouring in weapons and training its military, for the obvious use of it as a hostile power on Russia's border.

Given all that, ... what were Putin's options?  Whatever you think of the man (his authoritarian tendencies, his pandering to social reactionaries, his personal corruption) his own self-interest compels him to seek Russia's continued existence.  And Russia's continued existence was clearly being threatened.  Should he have tried diplomacy?  He DID try diplomacy.  The Biden-Blinken team of racist imperialist fuck-faces dismissed him.  Should he have gone to the United Nations?  The recently un-dearly departed Madeleine Albright showed how (in the case of the illegal invasion of Iraq) the USA would disregard the UN.

As I said in a recent post, in the case of Syria, it's undeniable that Bashar al Assad is a monster.  But in the shitty world that the USA still currently dominates, if one wishes to call oneself an adult, sometimes hard decisions have to made.  I'm starting to think that Putin had no choice.  Failing that, I certainly don't know when it would have been the day that Russia was completely surrounded and that the point of no return had been past when it would have been unable to adequately defend itself from the inevitable US attack.

But!  If you're a Westerner, that is to say, a citizen of the USA or one of its "allies" in the "community of rules-based international order"-respecting nations, and you POSITIVELY HATE war criminals and you're just ITCHING to get your hands on the war criminal Vladimir Putin, I have some GOOD NEWS for you!

Because you must know that it's difficult for us to get at the authoritarian leader of a powerful enemy state. We might never be able to bring Putin to justice.  But there are other war criminals we can go after!  If you're a US-American, George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Robinette Biden and numerous other war criminals are still alive.  Start a movement to go after them!  If you're a citizen of the UK, you can start with Tony Blair.  And we in Canada can certainly bring the hammer down on stephen harper who covered-up evidence of torture and child rape in Afghanistan.

Prove that you're not a disgusting hypocrite and a childish moral imbecile!  Go after your own homegrown war criminals!  I dare you.