False Pretenses

I’ve been listening to conservatives rail about how the United States is appearing weak in the face of Russia invading Ukraine. Now, I probably should confess that I had to look at a map to recall exactly where Ukraine is and why the Crimean Peninsula would be of any concern to the Russians.

Having grown up in the Cold War, my instinctive reaction was to label this as classic “evil empire” aggression. They invaded a country that had done nothing to them and had no capacity to do anything of significance to them. It felt like David vs. Goliath. My immediate response was to take the side of the underdog and wonder what we could do to stop this irrational invasion of a sovereign nation. I do not want to go to war, of course, but I found myself agreeing with John McCain, which made me immediately suspicious of my own judgment.

It wasn’t until I heard him say something that sounded remarkably familiar that it hit me. He was railing against what Russia was doing by invading another country using false pretenses, which was exactly what I had said and written when the United States invaded Iraq.

No wonder no one in the world can take our righteous indignation seriously. We are hypocrites. We are criticizing Russia for invading a neighbor where there are thousands of Russians. We invaded a sovereign country halfway around the world where there were no Americans, no weapons of mass destruction, and no threat to us.

Conservatives that pushed us into that war in Iraq, which still rages on, now want the moral high ground to lecture the Russians. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I believe that what Russia is doing is terrible, even evil, but my point is that what we did was wrong by those same standards. Conservatives and liberals alike want to have it both ways, and, without ruthlessly honest introspection, I suppose we always will. Or as Jesus said it, we all need to do more work on that log in your eye if we ever hope to see clearly enough to help our sisters and brothers remove the speck from theirs.

by Michael Piazza
Center for Progressive Renewal