MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: Bush to blame for Ukraine

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow asserted Monday that George W. Bush, who exited office in 2009, is ultimately at fault for the current Ukrainian crisis.

Ms. Maddow told colleague Andrea Mitchell that Mr. Bush’s entire Middle East policy has led to several overseas conflicts, from the Iraq War to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine dispute.

“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,” Ms. Maddow said during a discussion about her new documentary, “Why We Did It.”

“Those are the determinative constraints for our thinking about everything, from Crimea, to Syria, to what the overall size of the U.S. military is,” she said.

Ms. Maddow said the documentary, which airs later this week on MSNBC, makes clear that if the U.S. want to sidestep “these kind of protracted foreign occupations, like we [had] 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.”

Miss Mitchell, meanwhile, agreed that the Bush administration held widespread sway to affect “every other decision we make” including how “foreign leaders and perhaps [Russian President Vladimir] Putin view” Mr. Obama.