http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/ukraine-george-wbush-blame-rachel-maddow/2014/03/03/id/555790Monday, 03 Mar 2014 05:02 PM
By Cathy Burke
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow charged Monday that the George W. Bush administration's Middle East policy has steered America's current security policy and response to global crises — including the one in Ukraine.
Talking about her new documentary, "Why We Did It," involving circumstances leading to the Iraq War, Maddow told MSNBC colleague Andrea Mitchell that the Bush administration is largely responsible for the nation's current course overseas.
“The decisions of our generation on national security are determined more than anything by what the George W. Bush administration did with that nine-year war in Iraq and, alongside it, a 13-year war in Afghanistan that’s still going on," she told Mitchell. "And the American people are against those wars."
“Those are the determinative constraints for our thinking about everything,” she continued, “from Crimea, to Syria, to what the overall size of the U.S. military is.”
Maddow said her documentary concludes that if the United States is to avoid "these kind of protracted foreign occupations, like we did under the previous president, we can’t effectively make good decisions about that until we understand why we did that."
"We know the public case for why we went to Iraq was not true," Maddow said, adding that her findings for the documentary were "disturbing."
"It's getting at the question that needs to be answered," she said.
Mitchell, agreeing with Maddow's premise, noted that the Bush administration's policies impacted "every other decision we make — why the president decided not to go ahead with airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad on Labor Day weekend.”
“And that, some would argue, not me, but some of the critics are saying that has influenced the way foreign leaders and perhaps [Russian President Vladimir] Putin view [President Barack Obama],” Mitchell said.
Conservatives have lashed out at Obama for his response so far to the rising tensions in Ukraine, where Russian troops have a stranglehold on the Crimean peninsula.
