Fuck, I can actually understand how that particular brainworm strain forms: it’s confusing the oligarch owned media with “the international community” and falling completely for the sorts of bullshit the US likes to trot out to establish a casus belli on the targets it wants to hit. When the US wants to go to war there’s a non-stop blast of compradors, NGOs that are fronts for the CIA/State Department, and talking heads trying to create a narrative that the US is being “called upon to do this selfless act of conquest and occupation by the rest of the world, for charity or something,” then as the occupation drags on into a shitshow some dissent starts filtering through about how it was in fact a bad idea actually, and then when it finally ends there’s another round of the media crying and moaning about how it shouldn’t have ended because that makes arms dealers sad.

So that confusion is like, the default extremely credulous lib position because they blindly accept what they’re told to believe and have no framework for understanding why things happen or even what is happening at any point in it, all they know is NPR/their favorite podcasters/the nightly news is telling them to beat the war drums and start slavering for blood, so surely that’s the responsible and informed adult position to have.