So he has blood on his hands for not getting involved and for getting involved when both sides are likely to commit atrocities.
What a ridiculous bar to set.
Comment on Headlines
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 months agoThere isn’t a single US president in living history without a litany of war crimes on their head.
snooggums@midwest.social 4 months ago
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
What are you talking about? Please be specific. All I’m getting are vague “nuh-uh” answers. If you want to actually convince anyone that you have a point, you need to make it.
The first one was Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor. That’s not a “both sides” kind of issue. It’s an invasion and ensuing genocide. It’s not hard to judge what the right thing to do is there.
So like… what are you talking about? Please be specific.
snooggums@midwest.social 4 months ago
The first example was Zaire, so if you don’t even know what you are linking I’m not going to go through it line by line.
counterpunch.org/…/jimmy-carters-blood-drenched-l…
William Blum writes in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II that Carter, who had been in office for only two months, was reluctant to involve his administration in a far-reaching intervention whose scope and length could not be easily anticipated.
However, Carter did provide “non-lethal” aid, while he did not protest as European countries offered military aid, and Morocco sent several thousand of its US-trained military forces to aid Mobutu.
“President Carter asserted on more than one occasion that the Zaire crisis was an African problem, best solved by Africans, yet he apparently saw no contradiction to this thesis in his own policy, nor did he offer any criticism of France or Belgium, or of China, which sent Mobutu a substantial amount of military equipment,” writes Blum. [1]
He didn’t criticize, what an absolute bloodthirsty monster!
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I apologise for getting a minor detail wrong about the order of items in the list, I underestimated how critically important the order of items in that list was to you.
For instance it seems like you saw a chronological account and when the very first item - which is actually quite damning and from which you omitted the inciting incident of a CIA backed assassination - wasn’t a full-on war crime, you decided it was all frivolous. I can see why it’s so easy to get someone like you to ignore war crimes when you’re that unwilling to even read about them.
Anyway, if you go just a few items down the list, you read this:
The genocidal slaughter reached its peak in 1977, On March 1, 95 members of the Australian Parliament sent a letter to Carter claiming the Indonesian troops were carrying out “atrocities” and asking the American President “to comment publicly on the situation in East Timor.” [3]
The response was crickets. Carter ramped up aid with funding and weapons to the murderous Indonesian regime, brazenly flaunting the human rights requirements imposed on American aid.
So that’s a war crime, even by the extremely lax rules imposed by the US on themselves and to which they will never hold themselves accountable.
Hobo@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If those are the worst examples you can come up with yhe man was basically a saint. What a bullshit hit piece. I am now dumber for having read it.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
“Basically a saint” because he only sent aid to juntas and brutal genocidal regimes as opposed to what, exactly? Ordering the bombs dropped himself?
Also, if you think he was “basically a saint” even though his administration still backed genocide, then I think you’re kind of accepting my premise that “That’s what happens when you volunteer to supervise the war crimes factory.”