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| Ukraine |
My friend,
Your question to me is: What should be done right now about
the war in Ukraine?
The West does tend to complicate simple issues, often for
political reasons. There are only two important questions concerning the West’s
posture towards Ukraine and Russia. First question: How should the West
construct a coherent foreign policy? Answer: A realpolitik foreign policy -- see
von Bismarck on the point -- is constructed according to a realistic
appreciation of friends and enemies. Second question: Between Ukraine and
Russia, which nation is the military aggressor in the current conflict?
These two questions are paramount in any discussion of
Putin’s attack on Ukraine, because the answers to them establish national
postures, which are NOT temporary strategic or diplomatic poses. No doubt the
easily provoked Putin regards Ukraine’s valiant attempt to thwart a military
invasion from Putin’s Russia as a provocation. A modern Orwell writing in the
Associated Press might regard intimations of Ukrainian aggression coming from
Putin as, at the very least, an amusing fable. To be sure, self-defense against
an aggressor is generally regarded by the aggressor as a provocation that
merits further aggression.
In the light of innocent bodies on the ground in Ukraine, Putin
should be regarded by all presidents past and future – and I do not exclude
former President Donald Trump – as a permanent enemy and aggressor in
Ukraine. When was the last time a 40 mile military convoy surrounded and successfully
threatened Moscow? When last did Ukraine bomb maternity hospitals in Russia?
This is what should be done: As much as possible the United
States and all western states, pursuing a realistic foreign policy, should
support Ukraine against unprovoked Russian aggressions and terrorist attacks on
its civilian population.
It is not possible, American military experts have argued, convincingly
some say, for the United States or NATO counties and Non-NATO outliers –
Poland, Moldova, Finland et all to
enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. In the absence of that measure, President
of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked friendly nations to supply Ukraine
with effective defensive weaponry that may be used to prevent the despoliation
of the country and the fall of Kiev – in the 10th century, the
capital of a great European trading state when Moscow was little more than a
rude wooden fort surrounded by a moat. Zelenskyy has asked numerous times for
such weapons.
A friendly state should have no problem at all supplying adequate
defensive weaponry to another friendly state in order to thwart a military
takeover by an aggressor nation. Ukraine should have had such weapons in its
possession years ago following Putin’s annexation of Crimea during the
Obama/Biden administration.
The United States should take whatever measures necessary to
see to it that refugee corridors used by innocent civilians to escape the
carnage of air, land and sea-based missile bombardments, both within and
outside Ukraine’s borders, remain open. Not to do so is to give a nod to
practices regarded as inhumane by all democrat states across the globe,
including, one supposes, the state of Connecticut, where I live.
Putin has lately said that effective sanctions are “a
declaration of war on Russia,” and communist poobahs in the Kremlin have not so
subtly suggested that sanctions – U.S. President Joe Biden seems keen on them, perhaps
as a temporary measure – may be regarded by bloodleting communists in Moscow as
precipitating a nuclear war. Would a contrarian editorial in the New York Times
deploring such nuclear blackmail, editors at the New Your Times never wonder,
also be considered by Putin’s Praetorian Guard as casus belli for a nuclear attack on the Big Apple?
Putin’s war aims are plain and well known by all U.S.
intelligence officials and all American U.S. Senators – including Dick
Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, both of whom have met with Zelenskyy
numerous times and rightly decried Putin as an unreformed Stalinist.
Putin aims to conquer the whole of Ukraine and replace its
government with one friendly to his own unwavering goal – to move Russia’s
border to its pre-Soviet position and to destroy NATO, which quails at the
prospect of supplying Ukraine with war material necessary to defend itself from
an almost certain forced re-incorporation into a 21st century Soviet
Union of states that would include both NATO and non-NATO states.
We should be asking those whose war policy rested on an
early destruction of Ukraine what are their preventative plans now? And do
their future plans coincide with the best long-term interests of the United
States and friendly interests around the world that support a rational,
realpolitik, non-imperial foreign policy?
Most recently we have learned from a brief story printed in
the World and Nation section of the Hartford Courant– U
S
misjudged Ukraine’s ‘will to fight’ Russia, officials say – that
“Top U.S. intelligence officials admitted Thursday [3/10/2022] that they
underestimated Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s invasion.”
Lt. General Scott Berrier, who leads the Pentagon’s primary
intelligence arms, testified recently before the U.S. Senate Intelligence
Committee, “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.”
The Pentagon’s continuing assessments, shared no doubt with Biden,
Democrat leaders in the U.S. House and Senate, and important decision makers on
the Senate Intelligence Committee, precluded necessary material assistance to
Ukraine – because the Pentagon anticipated an early collapse of Ukrainian
resistance which, because assessing the “will, morale and a will to fight is a
very difficult analytical task,” did not pan out.
To put it in the bluntest of terms, 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.
The prime directive of the Pentagon, everyone should know by now, is to tell the president exactly what he wants to be told, and to provide a convincing narrative to support his absurd policy decisions. In the post-Afghan era, Biden did not want to leave to Russians a cache of weapons surrendered to a vicious and victorious overlord.
One woke senator on the committee picked up on the point: “Sen.
Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who questioned Berrier and Haines, noted
that assessing a foreign military’s will to fight was particularly difficult. ‘But
these mistakes had potentially real-world policy implications about the
willingness of the president or other NATO leaders to provide weapons that they
thought might have fallen into the hands of Russians in a matter of hours,’ he
said.”
There is another reason why the Ukrainian resistance has so
far survived a bloody Russian aggression: Ukrainians know what a country is,
what a neighborhood is, what a wife is, what a child is, what a family is – and they have been grossly
misunderstood by those here in the United States who do not know what freedom
is, what love is, or what “is” is.
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