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David Roberts's avatar

Increasingly I feel as if American Foreign policy is like how Fitzgerald described Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

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Katie's avatar

In reply to a Forever Wars (Spencer Ackerman) post about sanctions as weapons of mass destruction, I wrote the following, which seems apt here as well: "So, if it's a war crime to target civilians with munitions, why is it not a war crime to target civilians with sanctions? I mean, imagine that we were 'at war' with Russia and that the death and destruction caused by the deep freeze in Texas last year was the result not of poor energy infrastructure and regulation but of Russia targeting Texan energy infrastructure. Would Russia be guilty of a war crime? So what's the difference if US sanctions - whether unilateral or multilateral - starve or otherwise destroy the lives of Iranian or Afghan civilians? If a policy is killing civilians, does it really matter if the policy is military or economic?"

Although we are no longer conducting a 'kinetic' war in Afghanistan, I think our withholding that > $9 billion of Afghan assets constitutes, if not a war crime, then surely a crime against humanity.

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