Ukraine invasion: Russian troops move into eastern Ukraine The White House on Tuesday began referring to Russian troop deployments in eastern Ukraine as an .invasion. after initially ...
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By Dave Lindorff
The Western nations and especially the United States awoke today to a new world today.
After decades of hearing US politicians boastingly describe the US as the "exceptional nation," justifying its repeated violation of international law with invasions of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, El Salvador, and "regime change interventions in a host of other countries, because it could, all the while telling the rest of the nations of the world that they had to strictly obey the "rules-based order" of international relations, that countries do not invade or violate the borders of other countries, suddenly there is another nation that has decided it is "exceptional."
Vladimir Putin's Russia has simply flaunted international law and launched an all-out war on Ukraine, a nation (the largest in Europe geographically) bordering it in eastern Europe.
We need not go into the justifications Putin has offered. They are as invalid as the ones given by the US for its invasion of Iraq and for its two-decade-long war on Afghanistan, for its invasion and decade-long war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, for its mining of the harbor in Nicaragua and the funding and arming of a Contra army to create mayhem in that county from sanctuaries in neighboring Honduras, and on and on.
We have lived in a world for decades where the US has had free rein to ignore international law, the World Court and the UN Charter, because it has had a military power that no nation could contest. Raw ugly power was always the real justification for American "exceptionalism."
Now we're seeing Russia, its military over the last 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union restored to a point where, if not as imposing and as far-reaching as the US, it is clearly the most powerful force in Europe, has shown that it will do what it wants in its own neighborhood international law be damned.
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