Per Costs of War Project:
4.5–4.6 million+ people killed[note 8][a]
(937,000+ direct deaths including 387,000+ civilians, 3.6–3.7 million indirect deaths)[note 9][b]
At least 38 million people displaced[c
Terrorism and genocide have specific definitions you apparently dont understand. Striking a target in a city isn’t automatically a war crime (not saying these strikes in particular weren’t, just that context matters).
Contrary to Reddit the US puts a ton of effort and money into not bombing civilians. Still a lot less casualties than if it was another major power like Russia, China or anyone else really.
I agree with the first part, but as for the second one, Russia has been at war with Ukraine for 4 years, has fired thousands of high yield missiles, (even several ICBMs) tens of thousands of drones, and civilian casualties are still relatively low. And I’m not pro Russia in the slightest, but credit where it’s due they’ve done a decent job of avoiding civilian casualties overall. In grozny however, Russia just razed everything to the ground and civilian casualties were very high.
Credit to russia for avoiding civilian targets? Have you heard of the human safari? Or how about the recent (extensive) list of missile hits on malls in broad daylight? How about the destruction of dams, schools, and hospitals? Double tapping sites to kill first responders? None of these scream that russia was trying to "avoid civilian casualties."
Russia has definitely committed war crimes, I’m not refuting that. It’s why I said they did a decent job overall. The double tap strikes and human safari in Kherson were isolated incidents that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. I’m looking at the war as a whole, in which 12.000 civilians have been confirmed dead in 4 years, compared to about 200.000 soldiers killed on both sides, and 400.000+ casualties each. So looking at the civilian to combatant ratio and comparing it to past wars, Russia has shown particular restraint.
Now, the 12.000 civilian death toll is certainly an undercount, and estimates put total civilian deaths in Ukraine at about 50.000-100.000. Even if we take the high end estimates, it pales in comparison to other high intensity wars.
The civilian infrastructure is a different topic altogether, it’s mostly been tit for tat and both sides have targeted energy and transport infrastructure extensively.
The Sharon government publicly supported the US invasion of Iraq after the decision to go to war had been made by the Bush administration. But the Israeli position was that Iran should have been prioritized and that taking out Iraq first would remove an important counterbalance to Iranian influence in the region. And while the US under Reagan facilitated Saddam Hussein's acquisition of chemical weapons to use against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War--at which point Iraq posed a genuine threat to Israel, which was in part why Israel was supplying weapons to the Iranians--by 2003 the burden of sanctions and weapons inspections had defanged Iraq, and Hussein's regime no longer posed a credible threat to Israel.
As the ongoing disaster in the Strait of Hormuz starkly illustrates, the middle east is a chokepoint for both global trade routes and energy production. This is why the US and before it the British Empire went to such lengths to secure the Gulf oil monarchies as client states; it is why the US responded to Israel's lightning victory over the aligned forces of pan-Arab nationalism in the Six Day War by establishing a "special relationship" with that country; it is why the US continues to lean into its military sponsorship of Israel and Saudi Arabia and utilize these states as vectors of power projection even as they engage in murderous, bloody wars of subjugation.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, at which point the US stepped into what is sometimes called its "Unipolar Moment", the view in Washington was that American hegemony no longer faced serious political or ideological resistance anywhere in the world: to bring the globe in line with US interests was simply a matter of planning and execution. Recalcitrant regimes in the heart of middle east would be swept away and replaced with pliant governments built on at least superficially liberal-democratic institutions. You see in documents like the Project for a New American Century manifesto the hubris of the neoconservative foreign policy establishment at the time. They believed it would be easy.
Well. Here we are, still overestimating our ability to impose our will on oil-rich shiite majority countries through sheer military dominance.
Not to be too pedantic here, but I have to point out that this video misleadingly labels Netanyahu as the "Israeli PM" delivering these remarks "after 9/11". But Netanyahu was not Prime Minister when this was recorded. And he gave this testimony before Congress a full year after the 9/11 attacks, by which point, crucially, the US plan to invade Iraq had become a settled matter within the Bush White House:
In other words, what Netanyahu was doing in that clip was serving the interests of the Cheney-Rumsfeld junta, not the other way around.
But you're right that there are plenty of examples of Israeli leaders expressing support for US efforts to crush Saddam Hussein's Iraq before and after 9/11. And remember that by 2003 the US had already been plugging away at this for some time, from the first Gulf War and then the severe sanctions regime imposed on Iraq by the Clinton administration which killed hundreds of thousands of people--I mean, between 1992 and the onset of full-scale invasion in 2003 the US Air Force flew more than 225,000 sorties over Iraq to enforce an expanding US-administered no fly zone (which was described by US top military brass as an "air occupation" of Iraq).
But the considered view of Ariel Sharon, who was the Israeli Prime Minister in power when the Bush administration was devising plans for regime change wars in the Middle East, was that Iran should be the priority. He believed that leaving the Iranian regime in place while taking out Saddam's Iraq (which was Iran's principal rival in the Gulf) would only empower what Sharon perceived to be the most dangerous enemy of US-Israeli interests in the region. And from a purely geopolitical perspective, this assessment was correct.
I know he wasn’t PM at the time, the full video is about 2 hours long and I cba to scrub though and find the exact point haha. He’s labelled PM as it was uploaded two years ago.
‘ I have absolute confidence that if we, the citizens of the
free world, led by President Bush, marshal the enormous
reserves of power at our disposal, if we harness the steely
resolve of free peoples, and if we mobilize our collective
will, we'll succeed at eradicating this evil from the face of
the Earth.’
‘We have received a wake-up call from hell. Now the question
is simple: Do we rally to defeat this evil while there is still
time, or do we press a collective snooze button and go back to business as usual? The time for action is now. Today the
terrorists have the will to destroy us, but they do not have
the power. There is no doubt that we have the power to crush
them. Now we must also show that we have the will to do so,
because once any part of the terror network acquires nuclear
weapons, this equation will fundamentally and irrevocably
change, and with it the course of human affairs. This is the
historical imperative that now confronts us all.’
‘…I regret, primarily from Russia, there is a steady and continuous and unchecked flow of nuclear weapons technology from Russia to Iraq and to Iran…”
This is from 2001, weeks after 9/11, the groundwork is being laid and he was invited on as an ‘expert’ and spends it talking about how hard it is for Israel and that the whole world must go after the regimes, using the same lies as now. This was his rhetoric for ages.
Thanks for these, I've never seen this 2001 transcript.
My point in these comments has been that the 2003 Iraq War was not launched to "protect Israel", nor was Iraq the country Israel wanted Bush II's neocon foreign policy team to prioritize for military intervention. If Israel were "controlling" US foreign policy, as is often claimed on this and related subreddits, the US would have exploited the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iran.
And I see here that Netanyahu's threat assessment ranking of Middle East "sponsors of terror" in this testimony from 2001 is precisely that Iran is the true danger, whereas Iraq is merely "a regional bully":
Iran is more ambitious than Iraq in terms of the reach. Iraq wants a regional--Iraq is--Saddam Hussein is a regional bully with great danger if he acquires nuclear weapons, obviously, enormous danger, and that could happen, according to our defense ministers, within 3 to 5 years. In the case of Iran, Iran already has missiles that can reach--overreach Israel, can reach into Europe, but they are working on a plan, a 10 to 15-year plan, to develop intercontinental missiles that could reach the eastern seaboard of the United States. They want to be a global power, and Iran in many ways is not only the spiritual center of fomenting this strident militancy, it also sees itself as the physical power to marshal the forces to get the strategic change in historical terms. [...] You don't want to be in a position where Iran--and I specifically say Iran because it is the most advanced in the building of ballistic missiles. Iran in 10 or 12 years will have, according to their plans, if they are not stopped, will have a missile that can reach this building. Now, you can leave it and hope that deterrence will operate. It may, or it may not. And you are not going to have a hermetic defense precisely because as long as this terror network exists they might have other ways of delivering the payload. But I think we should do everything in our power while we have the time to do so. I think that is what our people, our peoples, the free peoples of the world, can demand of us, to do everything within our power while we have the time.
It wasn’t specifically just for Israel, a lot of it was bush wanting to impress daddy and Blair on a high from the balkans/Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan was going well-ish at the time.
But I think you’re reading it line by line rather than the whole connotations, he’s posing Iraq because it would be easier ‘It's important to understand that the goals of these countries is to have--they already have ballistic missiles’ and ‘…that could happen, according to our defense ministers, within 3 to 5 years.’ But he then say Iran is actually a lot far away.
‘…. This is why the United States must do everything in its power to prevent regimes like Iran and Iraq from developing nuclear weapons and to disarm them of their weapons of mass destruction’
He makes Iraq seem closer to being an intercontinental threat, and is saying Iran is still a danger but Iraq is closer to the red line for weapons development.
Also conveniently, the transcript is incredibly hard to find now for some reason unless you make very specific terminology searches.
Just construction stuff, i built the TOC at FOB Prosperity inside As-Salam Palace, built the structures around the fuel tanks at the fuel point between Prosperity and fucked if i can remember the name of the FOB before that, even though i ended up living there the last 6 months of my time in iraq lol
A shit load of maintenance work fixing doors and windows, building tables and desks and helping the other trades do things like set trailers and generators......built a shitload of containment cells for fuel tanks so if they leaked they would be contained
It was the most boring fucking do nothing job i ever had lol....Aside from the location obviously....We worked 7 days a week 12h a day but really we were available 7d a week 12h a day and i probably worked a grand total of like 20-30h of actual a work a week, the other 50+ hours we made ourselves scarce and found things to spend time on......For a few months in the beginning i was running the tool room at Victory, i literally sat in an air conditioned connex for 12h a day playing videogames on my laptop
It was boring AF as far as work went. I was however in a war zone at a period of time where the green zone was constantly getting hit with rpgs and mortars and unguided rockets, a 100-120mm unguided rocket came down about 15 yards behind my carpentry shop one day on the other side of a T wall, i heard that coming in while i was talking to my boss and ill never forget that moment where we both realized we heard something and what it was.....i have a lot of stories like that, a mortar came down through a coworkers trailers roof and went through the floor and buried itself in the dirt under his steps and didnt go off, took a couple hairy trips out to the little satellite fobs out in the city to help with maintenance during the height of the sectarian violence, had a friend get hit with a VBIED in an armored bus convoy on the way to BIAP, everyone was fine but it flipped the rhino over....Got a Blackhawk ride from BIAP to the Green Zone when i got there because they closed down all road travel because thats when they stafted the 2nd seige of Fallujah, there was outgoing artillery all day that day, so i got a 1am super low night flight over Baghdad in a Blackhawk with a door gunner hanging out the side and everyone wearing NV-- who i really visibly annoyed the shit out of because i didn't understand how to use an aviation seatbelt(which is just a fucking floating circle lol) and he had to help strap me in
All in all it was a wild 2½ year experience for a civilian. I was there for the last few months of 1st Cavs deployment, all of 3ID and the first half of 4th IDs deployment
Wow saying its ok to blow up kindergartens because it's in Israel. So that shows you really don't care and just use the girls' school as ammo because you don't like the US. Who could have predicted that?
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u/African_Herbsman 2d ago
That's what liberation looks like. If someone that isn't western aligned does it though it's called terrorism and genocide.