The American Left: Blaming America Again

The Russian invasion of Georgia is an example of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist imperialism and his effort to reclaim the lost greatness of the Soviet era.

Or it’s all George Bush’s fault.

On the face of it, it would seem that this invasion is yet another example of Putin’s plan to create a new version of the Warsaw bloc.

He has a history of totalitarianism that would lead one to that conclusion. His agents have assassinated critics in London, killed journalists in Moscow and jailed businessmen in St. Petersburg. He has used his secret police to throw rivals into prison camps in Siberia. He has shown himself to be a despot in the same vein as Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.

But that is not how the left sees it.

Nope, they see George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain as the culprits.

Matthew Yglesias of the liberal magazine American Prospect says that this conflict is overrated and the U.S. rhetoric is overheated.

Juan Cole of Salon says that Bush and Cheney are “Putin’s war enablers,” and that this war happened because of the Bush administration’s “long assault on the international rule of law.”

Cole goes on to say, “The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted. Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow.”

And Rosa Brooks says in the Los Angeles Times that Bush and McCain misled Georgia “into thinking that the U.S. would come to its aid,” implying that without all that talk about democracy and the rule of law, Georgia would be in just fine shape vis-à-vis Russia and Putin.

This is the same American left that cries bitterly when the NSA listens in to phone calls between Muslim terrorists in Pakistan and the United States. The same American left that attacks American corporations and celebrates Hugo Chavez.

And now they are blaming America for the Russian invasion of Georgia.

The famous American left-winger Lincoln Steffens once went to the Soviet Union and proclaimed, “I have seen the future, and it works.”

I have seen this act from the American left in the past, and believe me, it doesn’t work.

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