© ITAR-TASS/Barcroft Media
William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, meets Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Ukrainian prime minister in Kiev on 3 March.
I am starting to lose this one. How dare anyone excuse a great power hurling brute force against a small one, justifying it with some nonsense about extremists and a "responsibility to protect". There should be no place for such cynical bullying in a 21st-century world order. And for what? So a leader with a virility complex can play to his domestic gallery. The whole thing is utterly unacceptable. There must be costs and consequences.
But enough of Iraq. What of Ukraine? We can only gasp at the hypocrisy of a British foreign secretary and an American secretary of state
lecturing Russia from a Kiev street corner on the evil of invading small countries. Did no ghost of Iraq or Afghanistan, of Kosovo or Libya, hover over their shoulders? To be sure there are motes in Vladimir Putin's eye, but they are nothing as to the beams in the eyes of Washington and London. The occupation of Crimea is a village fete compared with shock and awe over Baghdad and
Belgrade and the killing fields of
Falluja and
Helmand. As the western powers repatriate their blood-stained legions, surely a twinge of humility is in order.
Apparently not. The west is now chanting psalms of self-righteousness. David Cameron agrees with Barack Obama that Crimea is "completely unacceptable". John Kerry calls the occupation "an incredible act of aggression ... on a trumped-up pretext". To the Republican senator John McCain,
"allowing" Russia to take Crimea makes him "remember the 1930s when Hitler took the Sudetenland".
The catchphrase for this crisis has become "costs and consequences". Obama threatens them, Cameron threatens them. The Commons Ukraine committee chairman, John Whittingdale, wants them "to send a very strong message" to Putin to "return to the table". Nick Clegg froths over them from his armchair. He is "absolutely not ruling out now the kind of options we will look at in order to make it very clear to Putin that there will be very real consequences". Wow.
The only costs and consequences on which anyone can agree is to
cancel a G-something summit in a luxury hotel somewhere, and to ban oligarchs from shopping at Harrods and sending their sons to Eton. We might also
keep our royals from their Paralympics. To this has the mighty British empire fallen. For all its armies, fleets and nuclear warheads, it can punish Russia's bear with nothing more terrifying than Harrods, Eton and the royal family. Putin must be rolling on the floor with laughter.
The truth is that western diplomacy has no language for the new impotence. It used to get its way by "drawing red lines" and threatening actual violence. So ineptly have post-cold war politicians deployed this threat, so exorbitant has been the cost, that enemies have come to treat it as bluff. Iran and Syria are the most recent examples. By the time Cameron tried to threaten Damascus with bombs, the British parliament had had enough. If Syria could call Cameron's bluff, how much more likely would Russia be to do so?
What has been encouraging about the Ukraine crisis so far has been the unusual emergence of a "case to be made" on both sides. For once we have seen a "revolution" with some balanced coverage. The BBC's Newsnight investigated the "fascist coup" in Kiev thesis, and found some truth in it. The legitimacy of Viktor Yanukovych as elected leader was contrasted with his manifest flaws, as was the motley character of the
Maidan crowd. We know of the divided loyalties of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
In the past week I have read more than I dreamed possible of the vexed history of Crimea, of Ukraine's role in Russian identity, and of Putin's complex relationship with Russian pride and paranoia. I have seen Moscow's re-occupation of Crimea as both understandable and illegitimate. Its legal crudity - without even awaiting a local referendum - compares with the political crudity of Nato's attempted encirclement.
This is a theatre on whose stage the fidgeting warmongers of London and Washington fear to tread. Even when McCain crassly compares Putin to Hitler, he nervously adds that he is against military action. The west can huff and puff, but dare not bomb. In a Pavlovian trance that requires "something to be done", it cannot think what that might be.
While many assume when God created the Sun and the Moon that He did so for light, heat, gravity, and other natural mechanisms, when looking at Genesis 1:14, we learn of four other purposes behind why the lights in the heavens were created and placed where they are. The Bible says these are for “signs,” “seasons,” “days,” and “years.” 
