> 130,000+ people were killed in the breakup of Yugoslavia, I believe those bombings were an attempt to put a stop to that killing and not commercial interests,

> 130,000+ people were killed in the breakup of Yugoslavia, I believe those bombings were an attempt to put a stop to that killing and not commercial interests, "blood for oil", or some attempt to kneecap the Russian Federation the way many Russians seem to believe. More killings to stop killings? The same could be said about the US attempts when dropping the 2 nuclear bombs on Japan with Japan being already defeated, but not surrendered. Again, if you can justify that you can justify everything. And they sure did. My point is that the reasons presented are hardly honest or factual when in the moment. The first victim of any war is the truth. > I'd find it hard to believe people in South Vietnam were broadly supportive of the US involvement there but there were certainly individuals who either benefited commercially from that presence or who hated the North worse. (They were not nice folks, if they couldn't fool the US into assassinating the village elders they would do it themselves.) I had a hard time believing the level of damages inflicted upon Vietnam when reading Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. > I think people in Kuwait were glad to see the Iraqis evicted in 1991. I agree with you on this, but Iraq was partly able to invade Kuwait also with the support/arms they previously got from the US when they were friends in the Irak-Iran conflict from just a few years earlier. Even the WMD's they supposedly still had in 2005 were from that earlier period from their then allies and not locally manufactured. > (There was a great photo of General Petraeus being served a Naan by a boy at a street food stand in Afghanistan who had a very ambiguous look on his face like he wasn't sure it was safe being caught in that photo...) Afghanistan was in such a poor state before the US invasion, that things could have only improved during the 20 years occupation. I'm now reading a history book on Afghanistan that goes from the WW2 up right before the US invasion and it's not a pretty reading. > I think some Ukrainians wouldn't have minded being part of the Russian Federation if it had happened peacefully or relatively bloodlessly like the 2014 invasion of Crimea. I beg to differ. I think Ukrainians most certainly wouldn't have liked to be part of the Russian Federation. Even the Donbass wanted its independence, and not annexation, after the 2014 coup. With that not possible, they went for the second best thing from their point of view. Oh, and I'm not Russian. Funny how, whenever someones diverges even a little bit from the official narrative, they get stamped as "russian".