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| Kyiv |
They have healed the brokenness of my people superficially saying, “Peace, peace.” But there is no peace -- Jeremiah 6:14
The war of Russian aggression against Ukraine began a full
month ago, when a forty mile convoy of destructive war material was seen by Maxar
Technologies in Colorado snaking its way from Belarus, to Kyiv, Ukraine.
Many supposed at the beginning of the war that Stalinist
wannabe Vladimir Putin would overcome Ukrainian resistance in a matter of days.
That convoy certainly seemed intimidating, pregnant with portents of future
mass destruction.
This notion – that Ukraine would fall without effective
resistance, as
Czechoslovakia had done when
faced with superior Nazi firepower from 1938-44 – likely was hard baked into
the American response to the war.
Lt. General Scott Berrier, who leads the Pentagon’s Primary Intelligence Arms, recently admitted that the Pentagon had misjudged Ukrainian
resistance: “We made some assumptions about his [Putin’s] assumptions, which
proved to be very, very flawed. I think assessing will, morale and a will to
fight is a very difficult analytical task.”
“To put it in the bluntest of terms,” this writer noted on March 12, “the Pentagon
likely had advised President Biden NOT to invest American troops on the ground
or necessary defensive war material in Ukraine because the defense of liberty
there was a lost cause. The resistance would be, according to Pentagon
calculations, quickly put down, and the American ‘investment’ ultimately would
pay no dividends.”
In Afghanistan, the United States had
turned over to international terrorists, the Taliban, an entire country. And
the Biden administration had left behind both Americans and Afghans who had helped
Americans to preserve a peace for two decades. In addition, the Biden
administration had surrendered to the Taliban, Bagram Airfield, along with a
massive cache of weaponry, as yet an unacknowledged strategic error of the
Biden administration.
A heedless repetition of strategic mistakes in politics may
sometimes be fatal. No doubt Biden’s
miscalculations in Afghanistan figured into the administration’s early strategic
calculations in Ukraine. Why supply Ukraine with weapons and provide assisting
air cover if Biden’s Pentagon’s advisors were telling him that Ukraine might
well turn out to be a second Afghanistan?
Surprise, surprise – Ukrainians, it turned out, were not
prepared to deliver their country to a victorious and rapacious Putin. When Abraham
Lincoln was pressed by members of his cabinet to fire General Grant, who had
suffered minor defeats. Lincoln replied, “I need that man. He fights!”
Ukrainians fight. And it’s rather a good thing they do, not
especially for suffering Ukrainian civilians, many of whom have lost their
lives in Ukraine’s major cities, under unremitting attack from Putin’s superior
forces that command the skies over Ukraine. No, no – if the resistance to Putin
is not successful in Ukraine, it must be successful in Poland and the Baltic
States not yet under a crushing Russian bombardment.
The economically crippling sanctions imposed on Russia by the United
States, Germany, Poland and NATO allies, all potential victims of Putin should
Ukraine fall, have not saved a single life lost to Putin’s unanswered
aggressions. But in the long run, Biden and others believe, the sanctions may
at least deliver an unambiguous message to Russia: Sanctions, more or less equitable, distribute
suffering, and suffering clears the mind wonderfully.
What, some are now wondering, would a peace proposal preventing
further Russian aggressions look like?
It should contain, at a minimum, the following terms: Every
Russian aggressor in Ukraine must leave the country prior to the signing of a
peace agreement. Russia must pay reparations to Ukraine in an amount sufficient
to restore Ukrainian cities. Russia must formally agree that Ukraine is a
sovereign nation. All parts of Ukraine
that have been forcibly seized by Russia, including Crimea, must be returned to
Ukraine. The buildup of Ukraine’s defense forces will continue until the
country is sufficiently armed to prevent further military incursions from
Russia. None of the sanctions imposed on Russia, presently or in the future,
will be withdrawn until all of the demands above are satisfied.
Despite his brave words in Poland – misconstrued, Biden has
insisted – that the free West ought not to do business with Putin, a war
criminal, Biden is a creature of bad habits, one of which is an unseemly
posturing before political campaigns commence, a trait he and other politicians
share with former President Donald Trump.
It is altogether likely Biden has no intention of
maintaining long term sanctions on Russia until the country tires of its
Stalin-light autocrat and dumps him in the ashbin of history, a consummation devoutly
to be wished. But this end cannot come to pass unless Putin fails, and
is known to have failed, in Ukraine.
The strewn rubble in Ukraine large cities, the masses of war-wounded
women and children leaving the country, Putin’s strategic effort to permanently
divide Ukraine along the lines of North and South Korea, and his ambition to
use the country as a bridge for Russian land trade with Europe, may succeed in
laying waste the best laid diplomatic plans of Biden and Democrat politicians
and news editors, all of whom are prepared to both weep over Ukraine and, at
the same time, surrender it to Putin as a trophy that will allow him an easy
exit back to Moscow, where he will be wined and dined by detestable, globalist
American billionaires.
That would be both a humiliating defeat of a mindless
American diplomacy-for-diplomacy’s-sake, and final proof of Marx’s dictum that
a historic tragedy, when needlessly repeated, makes its reappearance on the
world historical stage as comic farce.
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