According to many war hawks, like John McCain and Lindsay Graham, Putin has been aggressive in Ukraine because Obama showed weakness a year ago by not bombing Syria. Well, that could be an attractive position if not for the fact that a few years earlier Putin also was acting out aggressively in the neighboring country of Georgia. He invaded Georgia at the same time that the Bush/Cheney administration was busy invading Iraq. So, it doesn’t appear on the face of it that Obama’s stance on Syria had anything to do with Putin’s recent push into Ukraine. If it is presidential weakness that motivates Putin, then how do the critics explain that Putin invaded Georgia while our swaggering cowboy-president G.W. Bush was pursuing military aggression in Iraq? This argument is not logical.
But, I’d like to switch the reasoning and pose the reverse question: Did the US invasion of Iraq have anything to do with Putin’s new aggressiveness? It occurs to me that the example that the world set around the Iraq invasion by essentially letting the US get away with what was clearly a breach of international norms — going into a sovereign nation, deposing a leader, and “re-making” their government/military/finances, etc. — sent the message to Putin that if the US could do all THAT he surely could mess around in Georgia and now the Ukraine with no consequences.
Perhaps our actions in Iraq empowered Putin to be equally aggressive.
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