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How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine

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Posted By: Moritz55, 8/16/2025 12:31:31 PM

In February 2016, Donald Trump scandalized Republican Party elites at a CNN town hall event in Columbus, Ohio, when he dared to call George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq “a big fat mistake” and “the worst decision any one has made, any president has made, in the history of this country.” Trump’s assertion infuriated GOP insiders not because it was clearly mistaken or even easily disputable, but because it was all too true. A glance at the titles of major books on America in the Middle East written by authors across the political spectrum—Fiasco, Grand Delusion, Losing the Long Game, The Age of Illusion

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Reply 1 - Posted by: earlybird 8/16/2025 1:22:01 PM (No. 1991344)
Something I have noticed: FTA: To stifle dissent about the war and its origins, its bipartisan defenders deplore Trump and other skeptics as either ignorant, naïve, or somehow secretly beholden to Vladimir Putin.
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Reply 2 - Posted by: crashnburn 8/16/2025 1:39:53 PM (No. 1991350)
This is a long read. It’s well researched and written. It gives a great history of recent world events and politics.
8 people like this.

Reply 3 - Posted by: earlybird 8/16/2025 3:45:08 PM (No. 1991402)
This is a very, very long comprehensive history of what mostly went wrong.. And who went wrong. It took me longer than most because my eyes are compromised. My own attention was focused on my own Life 101 throughout much of this period. I am grateful to the author for what seems to be a fair account and to OP for posting it. I am sharing it with others.
4 people like this.

Reply 4 - Posted by: Flyball Dogs 8/16/2025 4:10:02 PM (No. 1991416)
Outstanding article. It would be hard to synthesize it for a book report. But some of the characterizations about our recent “leaders” were fascinating, including Presidents and “experts.” This is only one of many worthy notes: [President Trump] “His appointments in April 2018 of two notorious Russia hawks—the ambitious yet unimaginative Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and the simple-minded and comically combative John Bolton as national security advisor—ensured that America would continue to slide down the same path toward a confrontation in Eurasia.” Agree with earlybird. Thank you for posting.
1 person likes this.

Reply 5 - Posted by: earlybird 8/16/2025 4:30:47 PM (No. 1991424)
In olden thymes Luianne features artless like this as "Weedend Reades as we had more time to read them. This one was so omorehensiive and wellwriten. It was not a chore to read it. Like #4,that paragraph about Pompeo and Bolton was one of my outtakes. I already knew Victoria Newland was in this up to her eyebrows. Had forgotten MdCain's involvement. He crashed more than that plane. I was never a Condi Rice fan. Less so after I realized she was being\d some of the most disastrous appointments of Trump 1.0. McMaster, the SecDef guy who read Marus Aurelius, Kelly. Trump trusted her. because the Swamp was new to him. No more! I was stunned to see Fox employing Pompeo as its "expert" during yesterday's summit. What a joke!
3 people like this.

Reply 6 - Posted by: Sunhan65 8/16/2025 4:52:29 PM (No. 1991434)
It is a fine article, and it makes a point that needs to be understood. Russia has legitimate national security interests. They will not always align with the independent states along its borders. And there are times when interlocking military alliances to secure those states can threaten them and global stability more than they support it. The Great War happened because interlocking alliances and inflexible mobilization schedules triggered a continental war over a political assassination and a balkan conflict. Arguably, the Nazi Soviet pact, intended to ally the dictators against the weakened West, had the perversely appropriate effect of putting Nazi Germany on Stalin's border. Exactly where Hitler wanted to be. Exactly where Stalin should not have wanted the him. Extending American power to the edge of the Russian border was likely a bad idea. Some nations are better served as buffer states who remain scrupulously neutral when it comes to alliances. Poland was one; the Ukraine is another.
0 people like this.

Reply 7 - Posted by: Strike3 8/16/2025 6:53:05 PM (No. 1991484)
What made the invasion of Iraq an even bigger mistake was that they were the perfect offset to Iran. Neither country could cause much trouble in the Middle East because they were busy fighting each other for decades.
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