Ah, the “I had no choice!” argument for scaling up world tension. Yeah, we’ve never heard that one before. Hitler also “had no choice” but to invade Sudetenland, Austria and Poland.

The “we had no choice” argument is always used to take the victim role as an excuse to justify anything you like. Whether it is joining wars because they sank your illegal weapons shipment hidden in an ocean liner, invading a country because you made it look like they sank your ship, invade a country because a few terrorists attacked your country, invade a country because you claim there might be weapons of mass destruction, send troops and chemical weapons to a dictatorial regime because the freedom fighters threaten your overseas naval base, invade a country for denazification, commit ethnic cleansing, genocide and other horrible war crimes because some terrorist extremists attacked your country after years and years of oppression and apartheid, etc etc etc. There are so many examples in history where this tactic has been used. The entire cold war thrived on this bullshit argument “look at them, I have no choice”.

“I’m going to do something bad, so I find a way to justify it.”

• every dictator, agressor, war criminal in history.