Well let’s be serious. We can’t expect Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Foreign Minister John Baird — while they’re beside themselves with outrage over what’s happening in Ukraine — to say, “Oh, by the way, on the basis of a wrongheaded supposition, the U.S. invaded Iraq with my support and started a war which killed hundreds of thousands.”

Jimmy Carter speaks in such terms. He’s a rare dog in doing so. Recently, in an interview with Salon, the former president chided Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting Vladimir Putin’s actions were something extraordinary. Citing Iraq and other aggressions, he suggested Kerry get a grip. “The rest of the world, almost unanimously, looks at America as the No. 1 warmonger,” said Carter.

For Americans, Carter has an infuriating capacity to see things from the other side’s perspective. Having spent three years as a correspondent in the Soviet Union, I got a load of that perspective as well.

Over there, you can bet that when they see foreign leaders up in arms over Putin’s aggression, they chuckle at what they see as the hypocrisy of it all. They think of Iraq and chuckle and they think of the drone campaigns, with their collateral civilian deaths, and chuckle some more. They recall the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo in support of Kosovo-Albanians wanting independence from Serbia and see parallels.

They might remember the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, done on the pretext that some American students were in danger there. That’s not to mention Vietnam or the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Those with longer memories will recall the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic government in Iran in 1953 as well as that agency’s many bizarre plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Bearing in mind the examples of what our side does, it’s hard to expect Russians to get overly exercised about their own leader’s handiwork in a territory on which they feel they have a claim.

We’re not talking about moral equivalence here. Vladimir Putin supports killer regimes like those in Syria and Iran. American invasions, violations of international law and attempts to redraw maps are often done with noble intentions. They’re usually on the side of democracy.

So there’s a big difference. But to hear the self-righteousness of western leaders on the subject of Ukraine is a bit much. While not backing down, they should at least bear in mind, as Jimmy Carter does, some of their own history.