Incitement to genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement_to_genocide has been going on in Russia for years and Russian population has been systematically prepared by state controlled media to commit genocide against Ukrainian nation and other nations bordering Russia.
That would very likely end up being a 'own goal'. There are lots of past wars and past war criminals that would end up standing alongside Putin.
Guys/gals like 'W' Bush, Cheney, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, John Howard, Obama, etc, etc, etc. are war criminals over aggressive wars or attacks against Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and others. Even Biden himself would end up in the dock, being Vice-President during the Obama administration.
The crime of aggression is a war of conquest expressly to expand borders and/or subjugate people. And it is the supreme international crime because it is the genesis of all the evils that follow. That is the judgement from Nuremberg. The UN Charter and Geneva Conventions clearly separate between your examples and what's going on in Russia-Ukraine in 2014, Georgia in 2009, and Ukraine today.
Not all wars are crimes of aggression. You have to distinguish between them. You have to hold people accountable for the worst crimes, in particular when they are simple, or you've lost the entire system of accountability and prevention.
Iraq invaded Kuwait. That is a simple and clear crime of aggression. The UN Security Council did get involved, and voted for intervention, as the Charter requires. Every UN resolution against Iraq since then (around a dozen) stem from this initial event.
Regarding the 2003 invasion, either an imaginative person or an informed person could say: well, UN resolution 1441's "very serious consequences" for non-compliance by Iraq could very well mean military intervention, but I personally think that's Yamok Sauce, so I'm not buying it. Nevertheless, I can see that as a possibly viable legal argument. Plus, 31 countries agreed it was compelling enough to proceed with a multilateral intervention, which never sought to make Iraq the 51st state of the U.S., nor subjugate its people. i.e. Bush 2 invading Iraq was stupid and a bad idea, but not at all in the same category as what Russia has done to Ukraine.
It was out of the ashes of dead civilians that the Charter and Geneva Conventions were born, even before all the dead had been buried. You are an unserious person to talk of the only product humanity produced, that is intended to prevent world wars and crimes against humanity, as unreal. It is remarkable ignorance.
The invasion of Iraq was never going to lead to a world war, was never about targeting civilians on purpose with malice and retribution. Russia invading Ukraine to de-nazify it? The idea the U.S. is filling Ukraine with Nazis? If Russia really believes this, and believes it has a moral obligation to stop us, what do they do if Ukraine wins? They are already by all accounts committing, with intent, a genocide. And it will get worse.
China and India refuse to agree this is a violation of the Charter, let alone that Russia should immediately withdraw. The lines are being drawn now. There is no predicting how this turns out, but it isn't possible to exclude WW3 as one of the outcomes. You seem to have no comprehension, no awareness of the different order of magnitude the seriousness of these situations. But that would be consistent with being an unserious person.
This whataboutism is as nauseating as the ignorance.
Are you trying to justify what the Kremlin is doing, by blaming the U.S.? You lament the numeric deaths of civilians, yet you promote the uselessness of the only things designed so far to prevent it.
Whatever point you are trying to make is lost by you making excuses for Russia in 2022 while blaming the U.S. for 2003 (and not any of the other 30 member countries part of it), while proposing the latter lead to the former.
If you've read the Charter, you know full well why the U.S. and Russia wouldn't ever be punished by the Security Council.
I'm the last person to justify what Kremlin is doing. Putin should hang. But it also shows that mechanisms that attempted to prevent it - those that you're describing - simply don't work. And they didn't work for a long time, as proven by US invasion on Middle East, which didn't result in any consequences to the guilty parties. And that - US being able to commit war crimes with impunity - convinced Putin he can do it too.
>mechanisms that attempted to prevent it - those that you're describing - simply don't work
Wrong. They do work. They just don't work perfectly. And even when they are working, they don't always lead to the preferred outcome. Nevertheless it is an institution we need. If we lose it, we lose all institutional mechanisms to prevent another world war.
The five permanent members of the Security Council in effect have a veto. It was known at the time of adoption that should a permanent member engage in aggressive war, they would be expected to veto any enforcement action against themselves. This is the design of the Charter, the only way it could ever have been passed. None of the winners of the world wars would have willingly ceded their sovereignty so much that the entire rest of the world could have held them accountable after what had just happened. None of the five would have signed it.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Does that sound like a pretty good axiom?
"mistakes". An easy way of glossing over out and out aggression. In both cases, The US attacked those countries that were not an imminent threat.
Iraq: the US did not allow the weapons inspectors sufficient time to investigate first. Thousands of US troops' lives were wasted for nothing.
Afghanistan: The Taliban asked for evidence of bin Laden's guilt. The US refused, and attacked anyway. So again thousands of US troops' lives were wasted for nothing.
Though I agree that some of these people may have been complicit in war crimes (which will most likely never be officially recognized as such, in our lifetimes at least) -- on a more fundamental level, this post is unfortunately an instance of:
Incitement to genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement_to_genocide has been going on in Russia for years and Russian population has been systematically prepared by state controlled media to commit genocide against Ukrainian nation and other nations bordering Russia.