Twenty Years On...

[Being]

I hope we don't forget our past mistakes. Particularly the one where we listened to politicians making up stories of how some small irrelevant country was building the ability to destroy the world. Our acceptance of this over the top pretense produced the destabilization of a vast swath of our world that still exist today, almost twenty years on.

https://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/10/wbr.smoking.gun/

Why is Ukraine so important that the USA is once again beating the "mushroom cloud" drum?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/22/polit...ers/index.html

Invasion will hurt the US and Europe. Everyday Americans would feel the effects of an invasion in their bank accounts.
Gas prices could soar, writes CNN's Matt Egan. "It's impossible to say how high prices would go — and how long they would stay high. But $100 oil would surely lift prices at the pump. And that means a Russia-Ukraine conflict has the potential to impact most Americans."

The status of Western democracies. There is something more than the economy, however. Biden has built his presidency around the idea that democratic countries must stand up to autocratic regimes.
As CNN's Stephen Collinson smartly writes, Putin "is using Ukraine as a hostage to try to force the US to renegotiate the settled outcome of the Cold War."

Collinson also explains why Americans more concerned about the economy and the coronavirus pandemic should care about this "most tense test of wills since the fall of the Soviet Union."
Nothing less than "the biggest clash of regular conventional armies in Europe since World War II" is at stake.

Remember, it's not really about world stability.