Why Hasn’t The US Been Kicked Off The UN Human Rights Council?
The United Nations General Assembly voted 93-24 with 58 abstentions to drop the Russian Federation from membership on the UN Human Rights Council, based on allegations and grisly videos and photos appearing to show execution-style slayings of civilians in Ukraine by Russian troops. [...] Let’s look at some of those [US] crimes:
First and biggest, there is the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq posed no immediate threat to the US. Not even close the way Ukraine shares a 1300-mile border with Russia, Iraq had no navy, no long-range bombers or missiles and is located 7000 miles from the nearest US border. That war, completely illegal, went unpunished, as did the people who ordered it: President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
The same is true of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The excuse for that was was that the US wanted to hunt down and capture or destroy the Al Qaeda terrorist organization which was primarily based in Afghanistan, guests of that country’s Taliban government, which claimed not to know that the group and it leader, the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, were plotting a terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Because this was not an attack by Afghanistan, and because the Taliban was ready to surrender Bin Laden and his accomplices if offered assurances that they would not be executed — an offer the US refused — there was no justification for that invasion o the 20-year war and occupation that followed it, whose aim shifted from pursuing Al Qaeda to ousting the Taliban from power.
The US invasion of Libya and the overthrow and murder of its leader Muammar Qaddafy in 2011 was similarly a war crime, as, like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq before it, was never sanctioned by any UN Security Council Vote, and because Libya posed no threat to the US, imminent or otherwise, as required under international law. President Obama, who ordered that war, is also as much a war criminal as is President Putin.