not out of any love of Putin – and Hedges and Greenwald both agree he's a tyrant –– but for the reasons they've adduced at length: that we promised Russia that NATO would not expand but nonetheless expanded it to Russia's very borders; that the CIA & other US-affiliated agents have been meddling in Ukraine since 2004 and in 2014 backed a coup against Ukraine's democratically-elected president, and that the US then hand-picked that president's successor and has maintained its dominance in Kiev since; that Ukraine thereafter broke its promises pursuant to the Minsk Agreements to give Ukraine's eastern regions greater autonomy; that we're now pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into a war that's unlikely to conclude in a way that's any more advantageous to Ukraine than if it had simply negotiated with Russia much earlier, meanwhile leaving Ukraine decimated and far worse off than if it had negotiated earlier; that even before Russia's invasion, Ukraine was the most corrupt nation in Europe and among the most autocratic, and since the war began has become even moreso; etc.
All of that is not to justify Russia's invasion, which Hedges and Greenwald agree was clearly wrong – but to recognize as a practical matter – as did both Kissinger and Obama – that our proxy war in Ukraine is a losing proposition for Ukraine and the US as well.
Disagreeing with current US policy – perhaps particularly when it comes to war – is a fine d(D)emocratic tradition (in both senses), and I'm proud to participate in it.
I didn't use to be such a skeptic of US war policy, but as I began to observe more and more closely, I gradually realized that there was scarcely a conflict in which this has been involved in my lifetime that the US public wasn't basically lied into and that didn't leave the country we were supposedly trying to "save" worse off than it was before we got involved. I believe Ukraine to be another unfortunate example (following Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others back to Viet Nam).
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