Sandydragon wrote:I seem to recall that you considered the Russian and Syrian air strikes legal because Assad was perfectly permitted to use whatever means necessary to control rebels within his country. I suggest you need to swot up on international law for starters when applied to the use of military force.
As for exposure to the ME, Ive spent years in various countries over there and also have a wide range of contacts, so frankly I am quite capable of seeing the world from more than just an anglophile perspective. And I'll say to you again that the big difference between US use of drones and the Russian bombing of Aleppo was the attempt to restrict the number of civilian casualties, as required by the Laws of Armed Conflict. Having spent time in CAOCs I am well qualified to attest to the lengths taken to reduce non-combatant casualties. Its not a question of perspective, its a question of adherence to international law on warfare and your curious ability to only find fault with western actions.
You are not so well-informed as you believe. The Russian and Syrian air strikes were indeed legal because the government was fighting a rebellion fuelled by external forces and containing elements of terrorism, and had requested Russian support. It has not requested American, British, French or Turkish support, and therefore those countries were acting in violation of international law. I suggest you swot up a little on that yourself, in particular with regards to the rights of sovereign nations.
You keep telling me how careful the Americans were in comparison to the Russians, but not only were the Americans operating illegally (without invitation) in Syria, they indeed massacred countless innocent people, and their claim that the bombing of Syrian government soldiers during a crucial ceasefire was an accident is an insult to the intelligence of any thinking individual. It went on for hours, killed eighty innocent men, and allowed the terrorists to recapture vital terrain, thereby prolonging the conflict - which was clearly the objective.
Statistics have come to light that Barack Obama dropped bombs at a rate of three per hour last year alone, or 26,000 in total. According to you each of these was aimed at a terrorist, I suppose. But somehow 7 countries got bombed to rubble, countless civilians died, and a refugee tidal wave into Europe ensued. But none of this was America's fault, of course.
Of course, according to Western propaganda it was Russia's fault for assisting the government forces of Syria to rid the country of the terrorists America and its allies had trained and armed and sent in there, and which terrorists ended up holed up in hospitals and schools with civilian hostages for human shields so that it became impossible to fight them without collateral damage - much to the West's indescribable glee.
