Not really debating the point that currently it is largely D in favor of the current approach in Ukraine and its backing.
Refresher course.
The tides were 100% flipped on the Iraq war. R would call you un-American and not a patriot if you didn’t support us going after “Muslims” and anti Christians that were going to overthrow our culture if not stopped.
The political parties have done a 180 on both sides on this one

i'm not challenging you personal opinion on blair, i'm just telling you explicitly what i meant when i said "for obvious reasons", when you tried to simplistically portray it as me suggesting you only want to downplay his role because he's british.



again, pure speculation. you just claim he would have acted differently if he thought the evidence was bs - while i think that's a rather naive assumption, and not a valid excuse to begin with. you can continue to ignore this, but the fact remains there were plenty of people, plenty of leaders who suspected it at the time - and who drew the right conclusions.

blair is not a moron. he would have been well aware of mi6 leadership's biases and allegiances. i think it's much more likely he (and the loyalists advising him on foreign policy matters) correctly recognised it's flimsy "evidence" at best, but that "accepting" it would give him plausible deniability. i suspect he simply felt he had to follow america's lead, maybe genuinely thinking it would lead to a positive outcome for the iraqi people overall. that doesn't absolve him from the suffering it actually caused though, it doesn't absolve him from making the wrong decision, it doesn't absolve him from the fact it was a crime, regardless of his intentions.



i gave you the historical context of why another invasion of iran by saddam was highly unlikely after the gulf war, but it doesn't even matter. it's a hypothetical you exclusively created in order to downplay / rationalise what actually happened. it's irrelevant.

Seems Southern Baptists are now in war with... Their sexual abuse scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_cases_in_Southern_Baptist_churches
Horrible sect

They want to save the money for Taiwan.

For example: https://web.telegram.org/z/#-1540985845

That link doesn't work, this one should: https://t.me/gzvonews/5397

Lol the song

Since no one has mentioned it in the last few days, Avdiivka is being rapidly encircled by the Russians. It's been slowly building for weeks, but over the past few days the Russians have made several important advances that have put the only railroad into this city under firm physical control north of the city, as there have been successful pushes to the south west, and directly towards the city from the south and the east.

Map as of a few hours ago:


This is the city that the AFU has used to launch the overwhelming majority of their terror attacks on civilians in Donetsk city for the past 9 years, so naturally a lot of people who actually care about civilian casualties are really looking forward to this one being taken.

Bakhmut is getting all the attention these days, but it's not the only thing happening.

The other major area of fighting is in the forest around Kreminna, which a recent doomer piece in the The Times revealed that the Ukrainians refer to as the "Cursed Forest", lending some credence to Russian claims that this area is producing hundreds of Ukrainian casualties (casualties, not fatalities) daily. Russians have long claimed this is another 'meatgrinder' and have uploaded endless videos of fighting there, but the lack of movement in the front gives pro-Ukrainian people some hope that it's all propaganda. Time will tell.

This post was edited by kusotarre1 on Mar 21 2023 01:09am

I try not to look at isolated instances (as you all know by now) but rather look at things over a longer period. My view related to the current US position is that they have an expectation of a very strong Ukraine counter offensive and that this may give Ukraine a much stronger platform from which to dictate what they want, which is a reason not to countenance a ceasefire currently. Naturally in an eventuality that ukraine reclaims most/all they may then look for a peace deal, and it remains to be seen how Russia would view that (but probably unfavorably).

Basically as we said before its a question of who blinks first (which forms part of my rationale as to why there will be no peace, as neither side appear to be blinking).

The first photo of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Kyiv

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1638133146829873152