Which of the following scenarios do you think would be a justified military intervention by the US?

[Big Abraham]

None of these, considering that the first three would have ulterior motives and would only be used as a pretext anyway.

[Big Abraham]

None of these, considering that the first three would have ulterior motives and would only be used as a pretext anyway.

You would allow a genocide to occur because the US might have "ulterior motives"?

It's not "might." We already know what happened the last time Americans used "humanitarian concerns" to conduct an ethnic cleansing of their own in Southeast Europe.

There are ways of addressing ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity that fit well within the proscriptions of international law without relying on unilateral invasion. We have done this many times - international tribunals are set up for this very reason. Why America should be seen as wholly responsible for this, though, is beyond me.

[Big Abraham]

As an historical hypothetical, would this include the Second World War? Was intervention against the Nazis not justified?

We had already been "intervening" against the Nazis well before we ever became involved militarily.

If that's a reference to Kosovo then there was no ethnic cleansing of Serbs? The claim to the contrary is literal Serbian nationalist propaganda. Census figures for Kosovo's current demographics are not reliable because a) the area where two thirds of Kosovan Serbs live is not under the control of the Kosovan government and so did not participate in the census and b) there was an organised boycott of the census by Serbs elsewhere in Kosovo. Some Serbs were permanently displaced as a result of the war, of course, but this is true of other ethnic groups, including the Kosovan Albanian majority, as well.

What? In 1998 Albanian militants drove ethnic Serbs from their homes by the hundreds. Some of those who remained are unaccounted for and are presumed to have been abducted by the KLA and killed. In total nearly two thousand Serbs were either killed or went missing during the Kosovan War, including many killed directly in the bombing campaign. U.S.-led NATO forces also bombed civilians and public utilities en masse, an act of state terrorism. In 1999 a Serbian refugee camp was struck by heavy airstrikes. The atrocities were multiplied manifold as a result of NATO intervention, according to Wesley Clark himself something that was known beforehand, and that's to say nothing of the case of Turkey (a NATO member state) and their ethnic cleansing operations and other crimes, enormous in scale, which were carried out with a huge flow of military aid from the Clinton administration, increasing as atrocities mounted. I guess "ethnic cleansing" cannot be tolerated near the borders of NATO; only within its borders, where the crimes are to be expedited.

[Big Abraham]

None of these, considering that the first three would have ulterior motives and would only be used as a pretext anyway.

You would allow a genocide to occur because the US might have "ulterior motives"?

It's not "might." We already know what happened the last time Americans used "humanitarian concerns" to conduct an ethnic cleansing of their own in Southeast Europe.

There are ways of addressing ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity that fit well within the proscriptions of international law without relying on unilateral invasion. We have done this many times - international tribunals are set up for this very reason. Why America should be seen as wholly responsible for this, though, is beyond me.

If you were the US President at the time, would you have entered WW2?

After Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war, yes. Not prior to that.

[Big Abraham]

That doesn't really answer the question.

You rhetorically asked if intervention against the Nazis was not justified. I replied by saying that it's possible to intervene without the use of military force, as we did before the U.S. entered the European theatre. In the case of Germany, however, war was declared upon us so the point is moot.

You might wish to check what Serbian forces were doing at the same time (i.e. forcibly removing the Kosovan Albanian population by the hundreds of thousands, amongst other things: documented massacres absolutely included). I've no particular flag to fly for the KLA and of course there were atrocities and abuses on both sides, as is almost always the case, but it really is a matter of degree. You can certainly make an argument against the NATO campaign in Kosovo without resorting to regurgitating Serbian nationalist propaganda.

I don't deny there were Serbian atrocities as well but that is not the point. The NATO "humanitarian bombing" against the Serbs represented an act of state-terrorism (and, in the case of the KLA - NATO's ally - literal ethnic cleansing) against the Serbs. I've provided the figures to show this which you do not deny. How can you justify "stopping an ethnic cleansing" by conducting one of your own and violently robbing the Serbs of their public utilities? Like I said, there are well-established ways of bringing the perpetrators of crimes against certain groups by means of international tribunal etc., that do not involve conducting wanton mass killings on an industrial scale in flagrant violation of international law. Of course merely having Milošević before the ICC would not have been good enough for the United States, who wanted to integrate Yugoslavia into the neoliberal world order by the use of force, given it was the only country prior to 1999 which openly defied the Western hegemony

Genuinely not relevant. I do not think that many people would seriously dispute that the Clinton administration was prone to hypocrisy.

It is absolutely relevant! Have you forgotten what the justification for Kosovo was? Humanitarian intervention against ethnic cleansing, which is apparently achieved by a state under NATO and European jurisdiction being allowed to commit a large-scale ethnic cleansing of their own with full-fledged support from the nation orchestrating the bombing of Bosnia. There is simply no grounds, legal or otherwise, whatsoever for NATO to stand on.

[Big Abraham]

None of these, considering that the first three would have ulterior motives and would only be used as a pretext anyway.

You would allow a genocide to occur because the US might have "ulterior motives"?

It's not "might." We already know what happened the last time Americans used "humanitarian concerns" to conduct an ethnic cleansing of their own in Southeast Europe.

There are ways of addressing ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity that fit well within the proscriptions of international law without relying on unilateral invasion. We have done this many times - international tribunals are set up for this very reason. Why America should be seen as wholly responsible for this, though, is beyond me.

If you were the US President at the time, would you have entered WW2?

After Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war, yes. Not prior to that.

So if not for either of those events, you would've been content to just let the Germans kill every last Jew?

If you actually believe American entry into the war had anything to do with that, you are quite deluded. The United States did not even enter to war for the purpose of opposing Fascism - and the Holocaust of the Jews wasn't even discussed in the press at the time because it was hardly known about. So preventing genocide as a reason for American entry into the war is virtually nonexistent.

In fact, Germany could have been stopped in 1938, before the world war ever occurred. They were not ready for war. The British were able to do this and were contemplating this, and would have been certainly able to do so with American aid, but Hitler wasn't stopped, mainly because the leaders weren't that much opposed to him. In fact, they more or less tolerated him in many ways and even after the war started the elite determined they would be able to live with an expansionist Germany on the condition that the U.S. would displace imperial Japan and have a "grand area" of economic dominance in S.E. Asia. This was a position enunciated by the Council on Foreign Relations which became the official policy of the U.S. government, hence the imposition of an oil embargo and sanctions on Japan, etc. Japan was always the main target, never Germany. So there's no need to be hailing American entry into the war as some kind of humanitarian project.

Hell, the Japanese were monstrous aggressors right through the '30s, equally comparable to many of the Nazi atrocities, but the U.S. was not opposing it at all, all they wanted was that Japan grant America privileged access to China, and that went on just about two weeks before Pearl Harbor. Could that have been prevented, yeah it could have. But once the war took place, my own feeling is that it was a necessary war, once it started.

[Big Abraham]

If you were the US President at the time, would you have entered WW2?

After Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war, yes. Not prior to that.

So if not for either of those events, you would've been content to just let the Germans kill every last Jew?

If you actually believe American entry into the war had anything to do with that, you are quite deluded. The United States did not even enter to war for the purpose of opposing Fascism - and the Holocaust of the Jews wasn't even discussed in the press at the time because it was hardly known about. So preventing genocide as a reason for American entry into the war is virtually nonexistent.

Yes I'm aware of why the US entered WW2... but I didn't ask for a history lesson, I asked what YOU would do as President.

If you're aware of history, then you wouldn't even be ask the hypothetical of entering the war "to oppose genocide" when the circumstances of the time would preclude that. But my post strongly implies what should have been done. The English should have opposed Hitler earlier, and with American aid if necessary, to prevent a world war. Failing that, the English war effort was necessary and with continued U.S. food, oil, and materiel. After Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war at that point our direct military intervention was justified, even though it could have been prevented from getting to that point.