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Annexation might be the most outrageous way to disrupt equilibrium, but if done bloodlessly, it might cause less suffering in the long run, than toppling/installing governments w/t outward annexation. For some reason civilized world strongly prefers smouldering conflicts with violence and suffering spread -- and therefore, perceptually discounted -- across space and time thinly enough to look almost "natural".
Wikipedia on Syrian civil war: 15 March 2011 – present (11 years, 6 months and 3 days); aside from combatant casualties at least 306,887 civilians killed, estimated 6.7 million internally displaced & 6.6 million refugees.
For Iraq estimates and methodologies range wildly.
Costs of war project: 268,000 - 295,000 people were killed in violence in the Iraq war from March 2003 - Oct. 2018, including 182,272 - 204,575 civilians
The PLOS Medicine study's figure of approximately 460,000 excess deaths through the end of June 2011 is based on household survey data including more than 60% of deaths directly attributable to violence.
The Lancet study's figure of 654,965 excess deaths through the end of June 2006 is based on household survey data. The estimate is for all excess violent and nonviolent deaths. That also includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.
Is that burning slow enough?
This is not to justify any other conflicts. The whole framing of "justification" is hilarious, as it presumes innocence of any geopolitical act, unless you can't make up any excuses at all.
Is the claim here that someone should have annexed Syria or something? Annexation and long-run conflicts aren't the opposites, if anything the initial Russian annexation of Crimea just served as tinder for the larger Ukrainian conflict and eventually the current phase of the war.
I don't really follow.
You singled out annexation as an exceptional threat to international stability. Why do we need that stability in the first place? Not to save lives and to promote well-being in the long run? By this metric, I argue, conflicts w/t annexations inflict more damage than bloodless annexations.
That's absolutely an overstretch. Annexation and the launch of separatist movement were a direct response to revolution in Kyiv (revolution doesn't justify that response, I am just stating the causal link). Without annexation, separatist movement alone would have sparked the protracted smouldering conflict, that we observed till February. Invasion was in no way necessitated by the state of the conflict or status of annexed Crimea, unless you believe Putin's narrative.
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