AN UNPROVOKED, ILLEGAL WAR... REALLY?

 

It is difficult not to be amazed by the propensity of the English-speaking world, as seen especially in the media, to present the invasion of Ukraine as something for which it bears no responsibility.

It can be seen, for instance, in the use and overuse the expression 'unprovoked war'. That invasion, apparently, just happened for no apparent reason, outside of any rational explanation, through some kind of act of God. It is as if:

• A) the US broken promises about any future expansion of NATO toward the East were never made,
• B) said expansion never became a reality over a period of many years,
• C) Russia continued to be treated and portrayed like the very embodiment of evil on Earth, and
• D) NATO (a military alliance, it must be remembered) could not possibly be seen as some kind of threatening force by those being targeted by its advance.

Also, the repeated use of the expression 'Putin's war' must be noted. That expression seems to indicate that the whole conflict can be blamed on the behavior of a single individual, a bad one that enjoy doing horrible things. That is typical of a society that has elevated individualism to the level of a religion able of explaining everything.

Another expression is widespread in those media: 'illegal war'. It is a strange juxtaposition of words, when you think of it, something like 'illegal rape', 'illegal robbery', or 'illegal genocide'. In fact, it just sound plain weird to mix these words together in that manner.

Is it simply a way to imply that some wars are legal and officially sanctioned, and others are not? Some wars are good and justified, some are awful and unjust? But if it is so, by whom are they justified, and how?

The whole thing boils down to the idea that only the Western powers have the God-given right to invade whoever they want. That's exactly what happened in 2003, with the invasion of Iraq. It was authorized by the United Nations, but only after the US government lied through its teeth about it. It lied to the UN, it lied to its allies, it even lied to its own population, all those voters and taxpayers who are supposed to be the real bosses of a democratic country.

That war was 'legal', in a manner of speaking, but it was really legitimate, since its real aims were, first, to eliminate Saddam Hussein, widely seen in the US as an enemy, and second, to disarm a country accused of hiding loads and loads of weapons of mass destruction. The truth of the matter, of course, as it turned out, was that Hussein, though being a bona fide dictator, was posing no threat to the US at that time, and that Iraq never had those weapons it was falsely accuse of having.

In the end, all that probably just proves the veracity of the old saw: truth is always the first victim of war...

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Text based on a series of tweets made on the 27th of December 2022, about an article published by The Economist. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/12/23/making-sense-of-vladimir-putins-war