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"There is no such thing as innocence; only degrees of guilt."

China and North Korea too while at it, please?

No state is moral. People are (or can be) moral.

Yes, that is technically true. It is also completely legal. For reference it is also legal to shoot an enemy soldier in the back as they run away. It is legal to shoot an enemy soldier in any case except where they are clearly trying to surrender, including if they are just laying there unconscious.

The rules of war allow for far more than people realize. And Again, I'm not trying to let them off the hook. There's real questions about this entire thing being a war crime and about their targeting of bombs.

They aren't the arbiter of what is and isn't a war.

America was sharply divided between socialism and fascism in the run up to the collapse of the Russian Empire and emergence of the Soviet Union. Consequently, American leftists saw a ray of sunlight in the path Lenin took to revolutionizing the Russian socio-economic system. At the same time, American corporationists saw the USSR as an opportunity to describe American Leftism as a Foreign Invasion.

The adoption of European political theories and figureheads on the left triggered the hysterical anti-immigration reflexes on the right, polarizing and galvanizing the general public which had already grown deeply anti-European in the wake of the First World War.

This culminated in the Palmer Raids of 1919, split the union movement going into the Roaring Twenties, and - in a hat trick of reactionary revisionism - managed to unify Dixiecrat bigots, big money Industrialists, and evangelical Christians (both Protestant AND Catholic) into a single suffocating mono-party that would dominate American politics for the next twelve years.

The Neo-Confederates, the Industrial Fascists, and the Evangelical Paleo-conservatives congealed into the Coolidge/Hoover Republican Party and managed to govern virtually uncontested until the Great Depression upended their coalition.

But at this point, leftist organizing and activism had rebuilt and reorganized around generally palpable national socialist principles. And over the subsequent decade leading to Pearl Harbor, established a left-leaning national government coalition that was broadly sympathetic to the Russian and Chinese Communists to the point that we were openly aiding them in their wars against Germany and Japan.

Pearl Harbor was an attempt by the Japanese military to cut the US out of the Pacific Rim, precisely because we'd undermined their access to Middle Eastern petrochemicals and smuggled arms to the KMT/Communist coalition on mainland China. It was "unprovoked" in a very technical sense, but far from unanticipated given our open aiding and abetting of anti-Japanese forces all across the East Pacific.

America was leaning Communist by 1944. If FDR hadn't plotzed and handed the keys of the country to a reactionary like Truman, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely. Or, at least, forestalled it for a few more years.

This entire war is illegal, but articles like this just grind my gears.

Attacking a war ship on a training run is like destroying airplanes on the ground, or bombing infantry barracks where soldiers are sleeping. It isn't a war crime, or even out of the ordinary in a war.
And calling the sub crew cowards doesn't even make sense.
The frigate would have been just as helpless against the sub if it had been carrying its usual armament.

I guess I'm just allergic to dishonest propaganda, no matter from which side.
Also, fuck Trump, his administration, and every single US service member going along with this. I hope they get humiliated and are forced to pull out with their tails between their legs before they "accidentally" kill more school children, or deliberately destroy Iran's civilian infrastructure (an actual war crime).