General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The single most powerful moral statement the USA could make against Putin moving into Crimea [View all]Igel
(35,300 posts)That would be putting Clinton on trial for war crimes in Kosova and Bosnia.
That's one place this started, not in Iraq. It didn't matter that we didn't annex Kosovo (or Iraq). What mattered is that the territorial sovereignty of another country, considered "inviolate", was achieved through predominately military ends.
All the talk of Iraq is mostly because it's more recent and because it's more likely to work with a (D) audience that is partly still is engaged in self-castration because of it. That example will become more pertinent only really in the event of a Russian invasion and "re-purposing" of Ukraine.
Prosecuting either, however, would serve no purpose except for domestic consumption and those that we think are important abroad. We live in a small, small word--one which, oddly, doesn't include most of the Earth's surface or population.
The other place this started was in the perceived humiliation of Russia by the West in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the splitting off of parts of the empire. The Baltics are still a sore point, and while many analysts are talking about how Putin's now not just speaking of "Russians" but "Russian speakers" it's not new talk with Russia--it's a repeat of what happened in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Except then Russia was too weak, too disorganized, to do much. Worse was when the Baltics went all EU and NATO on Russia.
Putin considers his valuation of his own moral principles to be far more important than your valuation of either your own, Bush's, or his moral principles. He's sure in his moral judgments, fairly good in his political judgments, and really--we just don't matter to him that much except to the extent we actually do things.
It's like a scene from a comedy that I once had the displeasure to sit through. Two opponents. One adopted a kung-fu pose and made various grunts, shouts, and presumably threatening posturing. The other just watched the other guy's gyrations deadpan then pulled out a gun and shot him. We can posture all we want. Unless we do something that gets in his way, it's all posturing. Just as with the kung-fu parody, so it's portrayed as a kind of outrageous farce.