ignoramous • 12/11/2025

> US military ... worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds...

Acutely aware of this fact, yeah.

> There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them.

Not wrong. None of the former great empires that fell were as military capable as the super powers of the modern era.

> And in the immortal words of William Munny out of Missouri: "deserve's" got nothing to do with it.

True. Some on the Left have extreme take on "Nation States" for this reason:

  One was to challenge the thesis that nationalism and colonialism are two separate things — that nationalism is the good side, colonialism the bad side; that nationalism came first, colonialism later, or vice versa. I wanted to show that they were twins joined at the hip. And I also wanted to show that from the outset, the nation-state project could not be achieved without ethnic cleansing and extreme violence. This could be seen in the expulsion of Jews and Muslims [from the Iberian Peninsula], and that soon led to a conflict between states, because each state had an official majority — the nation it claimed to represent — and its minority, or minorities.

  The human rights paradigm focuses on the perpetrators of violence. It wants to identify them individually so that we can hold them individually accountable. It does not look for the beneficiaries of that violence. Beneficiaries are not necessarily perpetrators. To address beneficiaries, you need to identify the issues around which violence is mobilized ...

The Idea of the Nation-State Is Synonymous With Genocide: A conversation with political theorist Mahmood Mamdani (2024), https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mahmood-mamdani-na...