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Wrong. The result has been a victory for the people of Ukraine.
We can't win. If Yanukovych had been allowed to steal the first election the left would have screamed that we did nothing and helped prop up a dictator for our our own purposes (as they are constantly reminding us with Saddam and a host of other regimes.) If we took the high road and supported a second election (which we did) we are told that the administration is ignoring vital American interests in allowing our "alliance" with Russia to suffer.
Here are the problems.
Our relationship with Russia is not great. It never has been. The Russians have taken the side of the French against the U.S. in too many recent actions. In our support of Yushchenko we were not the leading voice for democracy but rather one of many "concerned" nations, most of whom were located in Europe. In other words, we weren't alone.
The Russians still don't trust us and they probably never will. Their country is being run by a man who seems to be returning his nation to a type of retro-Soviet-style controls. It is certainly not on the path to becoming a Western style democracy. Our support of an illegitimately elected Russian puppet would have done nothing to help stop this slide back toward Russian dictatorship, and would merely have succeeded in helping keep millions of Ukrainians living under oppression.
If the US hadn't stood up for the Ukraine, the situation there would be far worse today. In all likelihood there would be a bloody civil war underway and tensions between Russia and America would be far more tense. Our actions may have helped diffuse a potentially horrendous situation.
The idea that Russia is the last line of defense for "Christendom" against the Muslim hordes does not hold water in the twenty first century. Al-Queda and it's immitators don't need to fight their way through Russia in order to attack Europe or America. They can take any of a score of flights from Riyadh or Cairo or Tehran and be in London in time to detonate a suicide bomb in the subway by rush hour.
And our lack of warm friendship with Russia will neither entice the Russians into joining the Muslim world or dampen the Russian-American cooperation in fighting the Islamist threat. Remember, they hate radical Islamists perhaps more than we do, as they have lost far more people in the fight against Islam in Chechnya and elsewhere. Don't forget the abomination that took place against hundreds of Russian schoolchildren last fall. The Russians won't. They know who their real enemy is.
Even the concept of Christendom itself is outdated. With the exception of the Vatican, there really is little left of the Christian worldview in Europe today. If Russia is defending "Christendom" in Europe, it is defending a largely dead and rotting shell. "Christendom" seems to have packed it's bags and moved it's base of operations across the pond. If this really is a fight of Christianity against Islam as the author suggests, Osama needs to redouble his efforts and attack America if he wants to strike those of us who truely follow the Christian God.
I'm sorry, but Lind is hypocritical and wrong on this one. If America believes that democracy is the best thing for Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East, because democracy everywhere is our best defense for American interests, then we are right to defend democracy in the Ukraine. It is the right thing for America because it is the right thing!
Lind suffers from craniorectosis. Letting Putin manipulate the Ukraine in an effort to reconstruct the Soviet Union -- even helping him -- is so the opposite of being in US interests. It's not in US interests to permit Russia to increase its influence in South America by building a successor to the soon-to-be-deceased Castro regime -- in the form of Chavez' dictatorship in Venezuela. Russia backed Saddam Hussein. Russia didn't exactly work against us in Afghanistan, but hoped we'd fail. Russia (along with France and Germany) opposed the US during the supposed debate in the UNSC, in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq.
Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau, and the victors of WWI ensured that at Versailles.
Does Washington Times is financed from Moscow or what? They spreading anti-democratic views, their authors don’t have any ideals, like leftists. Additionally their views I could compare with views of political dilettantes.
Tell about "Russian Christendom" to thousands of dead priests and nuns who gave their live for Christ and died in Siberian gulags! Go and look at churches that were either destroyed or turned into storage places. Some tradition of Christendom!!! Another arm chair "expert" fool on plitics.