US hawks take flight over Ukraine

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-040314.html



US hawks take flight over Ukraine
By Jim Lobe
Mar 4, '14

WASHINGTON - A familiar clutch of hawks have taken wing over the rapidly developing crisis in Ukraine, as neo-conservatives and other interventionists claim that President Barack Obama's preference for diplomacy over military action invited Russian aggression. At stake in the current crisis, according to these right-wing critics, are not only Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also Washington's "credibility" as a global superpower and the perpetuation by the US and its Western allies of the post-Cold War international order.

Some right-wing commentators, such as Michael Auslin of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, which played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, have even compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's moves to occupy the Crimean peninsula to Adolf Hitler's absorption of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland as a result of the notorious Munich agreement in 1938.

"The toxic brew of negative perceptions of Western/liberal military capability and political will is rapidly undermining the post-1945 order around the world," he wrote on the Forbes magazine website on Monday.

"One can only assume that China, Iran, and North Korea are watching Crimea just as closely as Putin watched Washington's reactions to East and South China Sea territorial disputes, Pyongyang's nuclear provocations, and Syria's civil war," according to Auslin, echoing a line of attack against Obama that has become a leitmotiv among his fellow interventionists.