I think a material difference between Iraq (v2 anyway) and Ukraine is that they can keep doing the “well Russia was the aggressor” thing indefinitely even if the reality is more complicated.
also yes obviously some libs are still stubborn about Iraq, the worst ones, but for the most part its generally agreed that the Iraq War was a bad thing.
They’re already hate eastern Europeans for being poor “white” people (the thing a liberal hates the most), and truly do not see how the west is responsible for this poverty. My whole life I’ve heard them mock the cheap, durable housing that was built throughout the USSR with no appreciation for this mass, collective effort to house everyone after a devastating war. It’s almost like libs don’t actually recognize these people as humans.
Even more apparent is their failure to connect fascism with capitalist collapse and false scarcity. Libs hate that there’s visible fascists in eastern Europe, but think it’s an individual failing of these unenlightened people, not an obvious consequence of the west winning the so-called cold war.
These currents in liberal thought are so strong, and have been so prominent for decades, that I would say there’s no chance of reconsidering the narrative that is essentially bad things happen because Russia exists.
Edit: A lot of libs I think ultimately found the racism directed towards Muslims and Middle easterners to be unseemly, and this was a good starting point for reanalysis. I don’t see Slavs and their neighbors getting that same treatment.