[nik-]

Originally Posted by Itse

They don't need boots on the ground, they have an airforce, and the Islamist militias are not wearing Turkish colours. If the US wanted to intervene they could.

But as you said, they still consider Turkey an ally. An "erstwhile" or "rogue" ally, but still an ally, to the point that once again when push comes to shove between what is really a pretty straightforward good guys vs. bad guys situation in Afrin, staying on the good side of the bad guys is more important than interfering in a possible / likely ethnic cleansing of the good guys.

(Seriously the Kurds are as close to good guys as it comes in the area.)

Let's also not forget that the Islamist extremists are armed among others by Saudi Arabia, another ally that US eagerly sells weapons to with full knowledge that they are ending up in Afrin to be used against the Kurds there. (And Yemen, and many other places.) So the question of whether or not US is "supporting" ethnic cleansing is really mostly semantics. It doesn't really make a difference in Afrin if the US kind of feels bad about whats going on.



That's such a fundamentally American way to measure things: with American lives.

We need to make a difference between two things here; country to live in and government action. US is undoubtedly a better country to live in than Russia, but their governments and international policies are just as morally bankrupt, and US has been far more destructive. Russians are treating their own citizens worse, but especially in the Soviet times they were a lot less expansionist and aggressive.

When ever the US government gets away with incredible crap, they do if it's convenient. They are literally willing to bomb women and children to get to people who oppose them or their allies, aka "combatants". They don't want to discuss the fact those combatants are essentially fighting against a foreign invasion force. Doesn't make them nice guys, many of them are not, but that's not the reason the US bombs them, because we know they don't bomb the bad guys on their side. US drone attacks alone have killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children. Russia murdering journalists or even dropping that civilian airliner doesn't really make this race close.

Yeah, Russia invaded Donbass and Crimea, displacing over 2M people and some thousands of civilians dead, plus thousands of soldiers. That's terrible. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, death toll in the hundreds of thousands and an unholy mess that is still not over. They've been bombing Iraq for 27 years in a row. Plus they have that whole "creating Islamist militias in Afghanisthan thing" on their conscience. And yeah, they've always known those militia leaders were terrible people. They didn't care, because they weren't communists. That's just evil.

Yeah, it's nice that US is a more free country to live in, but they really need to stop killing thousands of foreigners to have some moral high ground internationally.

Of course alternatively you could argue the US are not evil, just idiots with a lot of power. You might have a case there.

The Russians never stoked communist insurgencies. The Russians never invaded Afghanistan. The Russian never starved 5 million Ukranians to death. The Russians never invaded your ####ing country. The Russians weren't responsible for pushing, globally, an ideology which oversaw the deaths of 70 to 100 million people.

The Americans invaded Iraq, unlawfully, and a lot of people died, therefore the Russians are absolved. Your outlook on history is tragically narrow.

People my grandmother knew, friends of her parents, left a safe life in Canada to go fight for the freedom of their home country, YOUR country. Now, three generations later we've got a massive apologist here defending a country that has really never changed.