The Liberal and Far Right Isolationist False Moral Equivalence Between the Russian Aggression against Ukraine and the Liberation of Iraq

Liberals and isolationists on the Far Right are making a false moral equivalence between the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the Liberation of Iraq in 2003. However, the differences are extreme. The Liberation of Iraq, led by the United States and a large international coalition, was against a brutal tyrant, Saddam Hussein, who was a serial aggressor violating a cease-fire and violating United Nations resolutions, in addition to harboring and financing terrorists. The U.N. Security Council had voted unanimously that Baathist Iraq was in violation of its resolutions requiring it to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and that it should, therefore, face material consequences (i.e. military action). Furthermore, overthrowing Hussein had been official U.S. policy under liberal Democratic President Bill Clinton. Overthrowing the dictator allowed Iraqis to exercise self-determination and to have a government that represented all major ethnic and religious groups. Iraq has become a U.S. ally in the War on Terrorism. By contrast, the aggression by the Russian Federation, led by tyrannical ex-Soviet intelligence officer Vladimir Putin, was against a representative and free republic that did not sponsor terrorism and that had never been of any threat to Russia or any other State. Putin used as an excuse the separatism by Russian-speakers that he had fomented to invade eastern Ukraine, even though they enjoy more freedoms in Ukraine than Russians or anyone else does in Russia, after already invading Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, much as German tyrant Adolph Hitler had demanded the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia be annexed to Germany. Just as Hitler then invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, so now has Putin, himself a serial aggressor, invaded the rest of Ukraine. Russia thus violated its 1994 agreement with Ukraine respecting the latter’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, including over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Ukraine made the agreement in exchange for giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. In other words, Ukraine is being invaded because it gave up its nuclear deterrence, while Iraq, which had a history of using weapons of mass destruction both against foreigners and Iraqis, was invaded, in part, because it had not given up its WMDs. In fact, thousands of Iraqi chemical weapons and the banned chemicals to make more were discovered and destroyed. Ukraine innocently wanted to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to defend itself against Russia, which the bully Putin uses as an excuse to claim Russia is somehow threatened by a strictly defensive organization. Moreover, whereas the U.S. and its allies did not seize any Iraqi territory, Russia has already annexed Ukrainian territory and likely will seize more. Drawing a false moral equivalency is itself immoral because it equates good with evil. The only similarity between the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the Liberation of Iraq in the context of American foreign policy, in addition to the similar erroneous conclusions reached by isolationists on both the Far Left and the Far Right, is how too many Americans toward the opposite poles of the political spectrum continue to view foreign policy strictly through the lens of extreme partisanship instead of rationally determining what is true or false, what is moral or immoral, what is legal or not, or what is effective or not. The exercise of such excessive partisanship, instead of patriotically defending America and its interests against hostile foreign actors, has been exacerbated by Putin’s interference in American politics because he recognized excessive partisanship as a weakness he could exploit. Whereas in the past, Soviet or Putin propaganda and misinformation was effective only with the Far Left, Americans on the nativist or isolationist Far Right have made themselves equally vulnerable to this danger.