Our invasion of Iraq vis-a-vis Crimea
"The USA has no moral authority to criticize Russia."
Well... we sure have greatly reduced moral authority. No way around that.
But unless one is quite young, you ought to know that what we did in Vietnam was far worse than Iraq so we didn't have the moral authority to criticize anything anyway.
And, in fact, no major power has the moral authority to criticize much of anything. China? The UK? France? Germany? India? Israel?
Where are these hypothetical powers with the moral authority to criticize Russia?
When Russia went into Afghanistan we had little room to talk after what we had done in Vietnam.
And guess what? After Algeria, France didn't have the moral authority to criticize our invasion of Iraq. And god knows that after Kuwait, Iraq didn't have the moral authority to criticize our invasion of Iraq.
And now Germany is upset about Russia reclaiming Crimea... and don't get me started on Germany's moral authority.
And so on.
One could say, quite plausibly, that the USA had no moral authority to criticize Hitler, after what we did to the Indians. But what is the point in such a statement?
In an imperfect world there will be great hypocrisy, but even hypocrites taking their hypocritical stands is better than everyone shrugging and saying, "We all suck... what difference does anything make to anything?"
And what about what we were doing to black people, even while we fought militarist Germany TWICE in WWI and WWII? We clearly had no moral authority.
Hell, we retained slavery after all of Europe outlawed it. I think the Russian serfs might have even stopped being property before we abolished slavery. (It was close... I don't recall the exact timing)
We suck.
But "we," the west, do have considerable moral authority to criticize steps toward the reformation of the USSR, despite the fact that we invaded Iraq and all our allies are made up of the major colonialists plus Germany.
Because we are, all things considered, better than any of Russia's many itterations of Russian autocracy and maintainance of a vast defensive empire of buffer states that will not be allowed autonomy.
The cold war was as "good" a war as World War II, considering the stakes and the costs, unless one writes off an area the size of Europe, and pretty darned populous, as historical fly-over country. Which many people do.
1935-1945 Russia conquered as many countries as Germany did, covering as much territory or more, and, unlike Germany, did not relinquish any of it until 1991.
It was a big problem. And despite the fact that we killed millions of people in Vietnam (we did) we still managed to retain the moral high ground versus the USSR on merit because the USSR was that bad.
The world would be a better place if we had not invaded Iraq. Fact.
But since there is no reason to think that Putin acts primarily out of respect for moral authority, the historical inevitability of the attempted reformation of the traditional Russian empire is not much affected by Iraq.
The Russian empire has covered roughly the same territory for a long time, with constant oscillation as Russia's buffer territory was swapped back and forth between powers, war by war. After the Russian revolution the Russian empire fell apart. And 25 years later Stalin had reconstituted it. And in 1991 it fell apart. And Putin has sought to reconstitute it.
And it is a malign thing.
But the real reason we cannot do anything about it is not our lack or moral authority, but the fact that we don't want to fight World War III.
So yes, we suck. We really do. And George W. Bush was our worst president by any stretch, and ought to be in prison.
But that is not a significant driver of what is going on. It is a glancing observation, unless one thinks that Putin would have been so moved by our failure to invade Iraq that he would have no interest in having Russian-controlled puppet governments in all territories of strategic importance to Russian defense.
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