re: #704 Political Atheist

Why we went into Iraq has as many explanations as sides in the whole issue. “Long term strategic interests” is non specific enough to fit almost anywhere. Russia is hardly into Crimea to remove a tyrant. They are protecting a population against a possible threat as yet wholly unrealized and to protect sea access and a couple bases. I don’t see much of a parallel. Certainly not enough of one to encumber President Obama or Sec. Kerry.

They’re not there to “protect a population” - that’s a pretext. They are there to preserve their access to the Black Sea (number one) and to potentially retain the entire Ukraine in their sphere of influence (more of a stretch).

Similarly, the most plausible explanation for our invasion of Iraq is not that we wanted to “remove a tyrant” (again, pretext, given that we’d backed him in the past). It is that we wanted to preserve our influence in an oil-rich part of the world.

What bugs me is a false equivalence being used to diminish our legitimate part in this. That’s playing right into Putins hands and I object to that.

But what *is* our “legitimate part in this”? Are you, in fact, saying that America’s foreign policy should be predicated on helping people in foreign lands, and not on maximizing our ability to maintain access to global resources such as (mostly) oil?

As for “playing into Putin’s hands”, I think we’re going to act in a certain way on this regardless of what people think about Iraq, Central America or anything else. My point is simply that, if you want to use words like “legitimate” you have to also admit that in the past we have acted less than legitimately.