[verme (prevaricator)]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

for me it's not that this is a war about morality or that "it doesn't really matter how many people get killed in the process"

it's that i have no control over it

Biden did.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

now, MEARSHEIMER--FUCK YES! that there is the light of reason. he makes perfect sense to me

I'm repeating myself, but if you prefer to hear it from Mearsheimer's mouth, here I'll get you the transcript:

I don’t want to absolve previous administrations, going back to the George W. Bush administration. I mean, George W. Bush was in charge when this all started in April 2008, and all his successors have contributed to this fiasco, but Biden bears principal responsibility for the present war, and he was aided and abetted in very important ways by individuals like Lindsey Graham. I believe they bear responsibility for the destruction of Ukraine. It’s just absolutely horrible what’s happened here.

These people, of course, didn’t want to settle the war when negotiations were taking place in March and April of 2022. These negotiations started right after the war began. They were perfectly happy to see us walk away—or to have Zelensky walk away—from those negotiations and continue the war. And what’s the end result? It’s the destruction of Ukraine.

If we had not pushed to bring Ukraine into NATO in April 2008 and continued to pursue that foolish policy, I believe Ukraine would be intact today. There’s no reason to think otherwise. I believe Crimea would still be a part of Ukraine. NATO expansion is the key element in the destruction of Ukraine.

Now, of course, people in the West don’t want to believe that, because it means we bear principal responsibility for this bloodbath. My view is that we do bear responsibility. But people in the West want to blame Putin—it can’t be us; it has to be Putin. We, of course, are always the good guys, and the Russians are always the bad guys. So, we created this story that Putin is an imperialist, that he’s bent on conquering all of Ukraine and making it part of Greater Russia, and that he’s going to reestablish the Russian Empire.

Thus, people argue that expanding NATO was a good idea. Some even say it’s too bad we didn’t expand NATO earlier, because we were dealing with this highly aggressive "second coming of Adolf Hitler." That’s the story people tell. But, as I said before, there’s no evidence to support this. In fact, what was going on here was that we thought we could shove NATO expansion down Putin’s throat. Every time he protested, we doubled down. The president who really doubled down on this was Joe Biden.

If you look at the decision-making process in the West in the run-up to the war—this is the period from November and December 2021 through January and February 2022—it’s hard to believe, but we made virtually no effort to avoid a war. There was all sorts of evidence a war was going to happen. In fact, the Americans were saying a war was going to happen, and they were having a tough time convincing Zelensky that it would. So, it wasn’t like we didn’t see the war coming.

I ask you: What did we do to prevent that war? Virtually nothing. And then, when the war started, as I said before, we actively undermined the peace negotiations. During the Israeli and Turkish tracks to settle the conflict, we—the Americans and the British, principally—went to great lengths to tell the Ukrainians, Zelensky in particular, to walk away from the negotiations when it looked like they might bear fruit.