Been a lib/lefty my whole life, but I guess I have a bigger streak of paleoconservatism than I thought. Excerpt:
"Yeah. Right. According to Kagan, if you forget about the facts, it all makes sense. The main reason Boot and Kagan bamboozle as they do is simply this: If the current crisis is Sudetenland revisited and Putin is Hitler and Georgia is Czechoslovakia, then, um, unless he is willing to push Russia back by force of arms rather than relying on diplomacy and other non-lethal instruments of state power, that means that in this little morality play, the part of the "appeaser" Neville Chamberlin is played by George W. Bush. Ooooopsy. What happened to the Winston Churchilly Bush of the last seven years worshipped by Kagan and Boot and the rest of the neoconservatives? Can you be all Winston Churchill one minute, all Neville Chamberlin the next while the presumed adversary is simultaneously Hitler and Stalin while invading Stalin's homeland? Things would get real stupid real fast, which is why these bellowing neoconservatives change the subject as quickly as possible after getting their Hitler analogy in.
But let me give Kagan some credit due and even a modicum of praise because although he rather buried the lede, he did say something important and intriguing and surprising in there: The Sudetenland Crisis was characterized by moral ambiguity. He does not go so far as to say "Hitler was right," but he allows for that possibility, or for the possibility that he was partially correct, anyway, or that the situation was too complex in real time to reduce it to a simple dualistic judgment on its own terms distinct from the events that followed."
Melos, Morals, Matryoshkas and Majorities: Of Sudetenland and South Ossetia