Apr 4
Reminder: Putin And Biden Are Both War Criminals
The horrifying atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Ukraine demand justice —just like those America has inflicted in its endless wars.
One plus about the world falling apart is that it reveals people for who they are. Covid proved America isn’t a true nation, but a weak federation of states that despite their wealth can’t coordinate a public health response.
Americans leaping to condemn Vladimir Putin for what his forces have done to Ukraine ought to take their favorite deity Jesus’ advice: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
True dat, America! True effing that.
Yes Vladimir Putin deserves to rot in a cell at the Hague. I would dearly love to find a way to extract him from whatever bunker he’s hiding in and put him in the docket.
What’s been done to Ukraine is nothing short of criminal. And as much as America and NATO have played a vicious double game with Ukraine, essentially selling it to Putin then leaving Ukrainians to bleed for European security, there is no excusing the Russian military’s conduct of this war.
There are laws of war agreed upon by most countries around the world. One of humanity’s oldest struggles has been keeping the conflicts powerful people always find a way to wage from harming bystanders to the degree possible.
Unfortunately, powerful people do all they can to avoid accountability for their actions. Only in rare situations like Nuremburg, after the end of the Second World War, are trials held that punish the perpetrators of violations, and only the losers are punished, not the victors.
American military officers in fact appeared at Nuremburg to defend a number of German military officers who were being prosecuted accused for taking actions the Americans had done too. Unrestricted submarine warfare and the carpet bombing of cities were both supposed to be against the laws of war, and these two actions characterized much of the Allied war effort.
That’s the hell of power — those with it make rules they then enforce on others, and only rarely themselves. This degrades trust and introduces coercion into the relationship and ultimately sows the seeds for the next cycle of violence. Only when the powerful are constrained by the law is it respected.
Basically, the laws of war boil down to this: combatants are obligated to do everything possible short of getting their people killed to avoid harming civilians. The reason you’re supposed to wear a uniform on the battlefield is to distinguish between soldiers and civilians, which is why Ukraine’s territorial defense units have put on fatigues.
And when you’re doing all the shooting you have to on the battlefield, you are expected to use weapons that will cause the bare minimum of collateral damage. Soldiers are obligated to call off attacks where civilians are at risk even if this makes their mission more difficult.
Launching air strikes in densely populated areas is almost by definition a war crime. So is shooting heavy artillery at them. Even the so-called “Thunder Runs” America used in Baghdad in 2003 and Russia tried, at grievous cost, in Kyiv and Kharkiv in 2022, are essentially war crimes in and of themselves because there is no way to be sure who you’re shooting at in such close quarters fighting.
Civilians are guaranteed to die in these situations. I was personally trained by Iraq War veterans who explicitly argued that the correct response to an insurgent attack was to fire whatever weapon you held, whether a rifle or grenade machine gun, in the direction it was pointed. This was supposed to scare insurgents off — and though I never had to go to Iraq to see the effects in person, I heard testimony and saw medics’ pictures that would never make it onto CNN.
Anyone who is interested in a taste of what this feels like from a soldier’s perspective is welcome to read this excerpt from my fiction which portrays exactly the kind of fighting we’re seeing in Ukraine only in near-future America. Looking at the devastation visited on Irpin, Bucha, Mariupol, and all the others is like seeing my fiction come to life in the most awful way possible short of happening in my own neighborhood.
War is hell. And that’s why building up and enforcing laws of war is so absolutely essential.
So American hypocrisy when it comes to war crimes prosecutions galls me something fierce. The fact America won’t even accept the International Criminal Court because it might prosecute Americans is in and of itself evidence of American bigotry.
Joe Biden is a war criminal and became one the day his forces wiped out a family in Kabul because they were afraid of coming under attack by another suicide bomber. This attack was not legitimate, was not hitting an immediate threat to American or allied forces but a target who had been under surveillance for some time and could have been intercepted elsewhere.
The President of the United States of America is the commander in chief of the armed forces. Joe Biden was directly responsible for setting the rules of engagement and making sure innocents were not harmed.
He failed. And he hasn’t been held responsible.
Biden’s execrable foreign policy team allowed a situation to develop where an outnumbered, overwhelmed force on the ground basically panicked. They were in that awful Mogadishu-like situation because of failures to predict the power of the Taliban offensive against the US-backed government headed by Joe Biden.
He failed at his job and thirteen American military personnel and hundreds of civilians died in an ISIS attack. Then came the disgusting murder of an entire family who had nothing to do with the fighting. To date, no one has been held accountable.
And yes, I call it murder, because there was clearly insufficient intelligence to justify the attack. A vehicle thought to be carrying a bomb that is under constant drone surveillance miles from the place American forces are is hardly an imminent threat.
The fact that Putin’s killings are taking place on a much broader scale doesn’t negate the simple fact that Joe Biden is also a murderer. He has no right to condemn the crimes of others until he stands trial for his own.
Of course, there is the small matter of this drone slaughter being the tail end of a twenty year War on Terror that not only failed but killed up to a million people in the process. Americans are still taking off their shoes in airports, Guantanamo Bay still has prisoners, and the Pentagon budget is still so high April 15th ought to be called Pentagon Day since the unauditable, functionally unaccountable institution consumes half or more of all American income taxes.
The American scam is simple. Our leaders use whatever excuses they can to terrorize us, then have the gall to selectively pick out bad things some other leader does to cloak their misdeeds. They git richer, we get poorer, and nothing changes, no matter how many protests progressives hold.
That’s how the bigotry of America replicates itself. First, bind people to some leader who spouts nonsense meant to make his backers feel good about themselves and hopeful for the future. Then you find some other group of people with a leader you dislike for whatever reason and blame all bad things that happen on them. Rinse and repeat until you get rich.
It’s all so pathetic, another sign of America’s dismal future. American prosperity and power since the end of World War Two has been tied to the illusion its killing is somehow nobler and more godly than anyone else’s. This has let dictators around the world cozy up to America trading cheap oil for protection while Americans point their fingers at everybody else who does bad stuff.
But now everyone around the world can see America is the same as Russia if they’re able to see through the English-speaking media’s perpetual information war. American media outlets makes money by crafting the facts their editors like best into easily digestible stories partisan in the audience can cite at each other.
This isn’t the real world. It’s a cruel illusion meant to keep us trapped and feeling powerless.
Yes, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. You won’t see me dispute that, ever.
Yet Joe Biden is too. Just like every living President since Bill Clinton.
Send them all to the Hague— only then can America be redeemed. Failure to do so is to accept the unjust silencing of the victims of the powerful and to become forever complicit.
Just because a serial killer has a fancy title doesn’t make their crimes any less evil. Nor does anyone’s personal desire to identify with them. If you enable them, you’re part of the problem.
Inability to accept this sort of simple universal moral truth is why Americans don’t deserve to have a country. They think they’re better than everyone else and their schools support this delusion.
Fortunately for the world, America isn’t likely to last a whole lot longer than Russia and for many of the same underlying reasons.
Good riddance to both. The people trapped in these fake nations deserve so much better.
