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Australian whistleblower David McBride just made the following statement on Twitter:
"I've been asked if I think the invasion of Ukraine is illegal. My answer is:
If we don't hold our own leaders to account we can't hold other leaders to account.
If the law is not applied consistently, it is not the law. It is simply an excuse we use to target our enemies. We will pay a heavy price for our hubris of 2003 in the future. We didn't just fail to punish Bush and Blair: we rewarded them. We re-elected them. We knighted them.
If you want to see Putin in his true light imagine him landing a jet and then saying 'Mission Accomplished'."
As far as I can tell this point is logically unassailable. International law is a meaningless concept when it only applies to people the US power alliance doesn't like. This point is driven home by the life of McBride himself, whose own government responded to his publicizing suppressed information about war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan by charging him as a criminal.
Neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair are in prison cells at The Hague where international law says they ought to be. Bush is still painting away from the comfort of his home, issuing proclamations comparing Putin to Hitler and platforming arguments for more interventionism in Ukraine.
Blair is still merily warmongering his charred little heart out, saying NATO should not rule out directly attacking Russian forces in what amounts to a call for a thermonuclear world war.
They are free as birds, singing their same old demonic songs from the rooftops.
When you point out this obvious plot hole in discussions about the legality of Vladimir Putin's invasion you'll often get accused of "whataboutism", which is a noise that empire loyalists like to make when you have just highlighted damning evidence that their government's behaviors entirely invalidate their position on an issue. This is not a "whataboutism"; it's a direct accusation that is completely devastating to the argument being made because there really is no counter-argument.
The Iraq invasion bypassed the laws and protocols for military action laid out in the founding charter of the United Nations. The current US military occupation of Syria violates international law. International law only exists to the extent to which the nations of the world are willing and able to enforce it and because of the US empire's military power and more importantly because of its narrative control power this means international law is only ever enforced with the approval of that empire.
This is why the people indicted and detained by the International Criminal Court (ICC) are always from weaker nations overwhelmingly African while the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever.
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