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Samizdata quote of the day – Do we want Ukraine to Win? Its in many ways the crucial question that needs to be answered honestly now. Do we want Ukraine to win the war and liberate all its territory? or Do we want Ukraine to be forced to accept a deal which hands over parts of the country to Putin? The rhetoric of western leaders is the former, though to be frank the policy looks more and more like the latter. We armed Ukraine this year specifically not to give it range, air superiority, etc. We forced it to launch direct assaults on defended Russian lines. Zaluzhnyi is saying that cannot continue. Either Ukraine is armed properly to win a modern war, or the technological imperatives will necessitate the continuation of this attritional war we have seen.
Western leaders must therefore answer that question now, and act accordingly.
– Phillips OBrien
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This is how the US has directed its own wars for six decades. Just enough effort and power to not win. We abhor acting unproportionally.
This means we can never win, because that would prove we put more into the war than did the other side, which is the definition of disproportionate effort. We’re crippled by our own political correctness, which means, so are our allies.
There’s another possibility: Ukraine has all the weapons it wants and still finds itself fighting an attritional war. Minefields are a real problem.
On the question of American being slow to supply arms, I seem to remember Perun arguing that this was all a part of its escalation strategy. Make a small escalation, if nothing happens make another.
“We abhor acting unproportionally.”
That’s one way of looking at it bobby.
The cynic in me wonders if not quite winning and dragging the war out is what the Military Industrial Complex wants.
Funny, that’s how the Correctly Thinking want Israel to behave in the face of Hamas aggression, too.
There is a whole intellectual class whose entire motive is to prove that their own culture is inferior. It gives them a feel of virtue somehow. There are countless histories and documentaries whose central theme is “how X culture is/was better than the West”.
So isn’t the logical extension of that belief that if the West is going to fight wars, it should at least have the decency to lose them?
I don’t want Ukraine to win or lose, but I do want Russia, or more accurately Putin, to lose and lose badly. That said, US taxpayers have given enough arms, equipment, support, and cash to the cause. we simply can’t afford it at this point.
Of course we (that is to say Washington) don’t want to win and don’t want to lose. Politicians love small to medium sized war, especially if it is endless. It gives them cover to do all the things they want to do — raise taxes, borrow money, pay off their donors, restrict civil liberties, misdirect attention from their own misdeeds and corruption with war stories, puts them on TV with somber stories of their own “stand against tyranny” and on and on. And wars like Ukraine are particularly preferred because they can be made to seem really important, but are far, far away and don’t involve American’s in body bags. (Plus we can make a fortune selling body bags to Ukraine too!)
I have said from the very beginning that this will just be the typical stalemate, attritional war. What a great thing that is, if you are an American politician. War materiel has that great advantage that it gets blown up. So your friends in the military industrial complex keep making more and more stuff, and consequently keep sending more and more money to politicians, who keep buying their stuff with borrowed money. And if you question such a thing it means you love Putin, hate Ukraine and want their babies to die.
Far and away the best way to end this war and a lot of the other burgeoning conflicts around the world has nothing to do with Javelin missiles or F16 fighter jets. It is simply for America to go back to Trump’s energy policy. Drive down the price of oil and Russia will be utterly hobbled, and Saudi Arabia and Iran’s power will be seriously constrained.
Because I assure you, even if you believe in the whole carbon-in-the-atmosphere-is-destroying-the-world thing, the Ukraine war has dumped more green house gasses into the atmosphere than the alleged savings from electric cars and CFC lightbulbs put together.
Fraser:
Hear, hear!
This deserved to be more prominent in your comment.
Trump did mention his energy policy in connection to Russia, in his interview with Megyn Kelly, but he failed to say that that is the first thing to do as soon as he gets back in charge. Is he getting old, or is he still too clever for me to figure out?
Once again, for the umpty-teenth time, American ‘leaders’ (of which the addled and senile President Biden is, at this point, merely the titular figurehead) hear ‘war’, and their immediate, knee-jerk reaction is ‘Aaah! Guns and bombs and shiny aluminum, oh my!’. When, as SunTzu taught and Fraser Orr reiterates, the war in Ukraine could be stopped and Russia put back in its box in a matter of days or weeks, without firing another shot, simply by deploying non-military strategies that the piddling and trembling Russian economy has no possible way to resist. Yet the lure of guns and bombs and shiny aluminum is just too strong.
llater,
llamas
You must be joking 😀 Vast majority of US military aid has been gear mostly written off in terms of residual value, older non-state of the art systems. These have been dusted off after sitting in warehouses for a decade or two (the ATACMs are quite literally past their official ‘use by dates’ – cheaper to ship them to Ukraine than to store them until their value depreciates to zero). Also, non US sources produce more 155/105mm artillery ammo than the USA does.
Given the geopolitical return of Russia getting crushed, this is chump change for the USA. As for non-military aid keeping Ukraine afloat, EU far outstrips USA (as of course it should).
We want neither.
We want Ukrainians to bleed the Russians dry – by spending their own blood – while allowing the politically connected to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into their coffers.
When people are making whole careers out of a war you can expect that war to drag on – look at Afghanistan. That couldn’t be brought to a close until those who had made their bones no longer needed it.
That’s easy for you to say. It isn’t your Federal Reserve turning on the printers so the US government can replace all that equipment they’ve sent to Ukraine and write checks to fund somebody else’s war and raising inflation to the highest level in 40 years in the process. Stopping Putin is all well and noble and whatnot, but when it means the price of a loaf of bread has doubled in the space of a year and your paycheck hasn’t then it isn’t such an important cause.
And we still have China on the horizon.
To which it must be added, that spending even a dollar on a foreign conflict is a waste of money unless you spend enough to influence the outcome. Otherwise why bother?
US politicians seem to have two possible motive sets for being in favor of the US supporting the losing side in a war: (1) their well-connected friends are going to make millions (billions?) from the movement of arms to Ukraine; or (2) it’s politically convenient to support the conflict but also ideologically necessary to make sure that the side the US supports loses in the end, because in their ideology the US (and by extension their friends and allies) are the “bad” guys.
This naturally applies to other conflicts as well, of course.
It was already being replaced & would have been regardless of what happened in Ukraine.
Seriously? USA & indeed Europe are not supporting Ukraine because it is “noble”, that’s really really not how national interests work. USA & most of Europe is opposing Russian imperial expansion because keeping Russia a peripheral threat as far east as possible is a geopolitical no-brainer. This is a once in a generation chance to break Russia & make it irrelevant for the foreseeable future. Yes, its also a noble thing to help a nation fight against Nazi-like Russia, but that’s sure as hell not why Ukraine is actually getting all those containers full of bang-bang.
From the military standpoint, there’s been something more than a little “off” with the Ukraine deal from day one.
It’s like Afghanistan: What’s the number one, very first, tippy-top thing they teach you in Counterinsurgency 101? To isolate the battlefield and prevent your insurgent problem from finding outside support, shelter, and supply.
Didja see any of that, in Afghanistan? Did we do anything about the Pakistani ISI doing what they did with the Taliban? Did we seal the borders, cut the (highly fungible) aid to Pakistan? Did anyone look at that entire conflict and ask the question “Is this even doable, given the logistics and terrain…?”
Nope. None of those things were done.
Now, ask yourself why. Who benefited? Where’d the money go?
Having done that, start asking yourself why the Ukrainian situation developed as it did. We (our vaunted US military/intelligence system) were telling the Ukrainians not to worry about an invasion; Putin was posturing. This was why the Ukrainians were so poorly prepared in the south, and why the Russians were so successful. Only in the northern theater were they able to get their defenses set and capable of defending Ukraine; that was a military miracle. Then, conveniently, the US magnanimously offered Zelensky a free ride to wherever he wanted, along with his family. That was the game plan; you could see that. The captured documents that later appeared showing how the Russians meant to expropriate Ukrainian assets make it clear that they thought the fix was in; factions in the US had to have been telling them so. Over-confident, the Russians did what they did, thinking they’d been green-lighted by the Biden Krime Krewe. Only thing is, the victim didn’t cooperate, and here we are.
You can only speculate about what the hell made for that sudden shift, and why all the military support materialized. Do remember that the Obama admin flatly refused to send anything other than “humanitarian aid” to Ukraine; it was Trump that started sending them Javelins and trainers. Since Biden is basically the third term of Obama’s presidency, do the ‘effing math, here.
My guess is that all the corruption that Ukraine knows about and can document in the case of the Biden Krime Krewe and all the rest of our uniparty thugocracy is being held over their heads. They ain’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts; they fear what Ukraine might dump into the international media, same as the Germans do. Only difference is, most of the Germans weren’t so heavily exposed to Ukraine, and I suspect that the Ukrainians don’t have good direct evidence.
The root problem we have here? The establishment oligarchy that’s entrenched internationally. It’s just like with the whole “Oil for Food” scam that Saddam ran on the UN and Europe; the oligarchs get rich, the common people get screwed, and nobody cares about the side-effects. There were literally tons of things we found in Iraq that showed just how little the European “allies” of the United States cared for the sanctions or about the Iraqi people. I saw a lot of that crap, personally; if you took some of your time off to go poking around the various buildings in Tikrit at what became Camp Speicher, you could find all sorts of interesting things that people had missed, and which showed very clearly that many “allies” were breaking the sanctions with glee and aplomb. Shipping manifests, labels on crates, all that jazz; the evidence was there, just like the WMD were. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had to MEDEVAC all those EOD teams that ran into chemical weapons, that the New York Times later accused the Army of covering up…
Ya wanna fix the world? My advice? Nuke the capitals, and nuke wherever the WEF is meeting next. Run forensic audits on all these crooks, find out how someone like Nancy Pelosi got so wealthy, and ask how it is Dianne Feinstein had a 160 million dollar fortune when she died, after a lifetime of government service…
None of what you see in the news and “commentary”, which is more “guided thought” through the copious evidence to the contrary of the establishment narratives than it is anything else, is actually at all the “truth” of what has been going on. Your leaders are crooked scoundrels, and you keep electing them. The one guy they got past the gauntlet of control here in the US got the reaction from the establishment that you see paraded before you on the daily, and if you’re analyzing that as anything other than an immune reaction from the “system”, well… You’re charmingly naive and probably too trusting to be let out in public by yourself, without an adult minder.
Indeed, but the outcome has already been massively influenced.
Kyiv would have fallen within the first month of the war without western support. To be fair, it was mostly European/UK military aid rather than American that was crucial in ensuring the failure of the Russian Kyiv/Kharkiv offensives. But the subsequent Ukrainian counter offensives were only possible once US aid belatedly started rolling in at scale. The logical plan would have been help Ukraine win big (if HIMARS & mobility assets had been 6 months earlier before Russia dug in, Ukraine would probably be back on the Azov Sea by now). But even at the current level of aid, Ukraine has enough to not ‘lose’.
That is not really true. Even Zelenskyy admitted he was not convinced Russia was really going to do what it did until it was too late (based on his political analysis), even though Zaluzhnyi & Budanov were telling him otherwise based on their own & various NATO inputs. British intelligence & various well connected talking heads like General Sir Richard Barrons were openly stating Russia is absolutely going to attack Ukraine days & even weeks before it happened.
Beware the Americocentric fallacy, not everything happens because of what the USA does or doesn’t do. I have had many well informed Ukrainians tell me the main problem in the south was primarily one of subversion. Russia was far more successful at compromising local political & to some extent military leadership in the south, resulting in minefields being removed mere weeks before the attack, bridges not being blown, militia units being told to not mobilise, etc. etc… Orders from Kyiv were simply not carried out in a timely manner if at all for several crucial days.
You clearly don’t know how the US military supply system works. The material that was old and out of date we sent? If it was replaced anyway we wouldn’t be facing shortages now that the warehouses are empty, and we certainly wouldn’t have had decades of troops firing old ammo, using out of date systems, scavenging for parts for systems long out of production, and occasionally having to make due without replacements at all.
In peacetime.
But while we’re on the subject, Russia is Europe’s problem. Ukraine is Europe’s problem. Europe has done nothing to prop up their militaries since the end of the Cold War, even after being unable to handle a brushfire conflict in Yugoslavia. The US has paid double what Europe has paid to help Ukraine. Germany has maybe a battalion of usable armor, less than half of its IFVs are usable, and while they have sworn to spend 100 billion Euros to fix the problems, it’s not going to be fixed overnight. The Royal Navy is about the size of the US Coast Guard (outside of the carriers, natch), and the Italian Air Force has about 200 combat aircraft on thebooks. The Europeans have coasted for far too long knowing America will handle the heavy lifting. We can’t. We’re broke, our military is spent after two years in the desert, the leadership is more concerned with sensitivity training than making sure sailors know seamanship, and it’s not going to magically get better now that China is getting ready to make moves in the Pacific and the White House is run by a pedophile, a woman who has either slept her way or used her skin and failed upwards every step of her career, and God knows who behind the scenes.
And Israel.
And we have an imploding economy to boot.
It’s Europe’s war. Let Europe handle Europe’s problem for once or at least let Europe foot the bill for it.
Yup, it’s official, you don’t understand geopolitics at all. Not even slightly.
The US doesn’t want Europe destabilised, both for economic reasons & because USA dominates western geopolitics. It’s the top dog. Why? Because it has a really big economy & spends a lot on bang-bang capabilities such as 11 big carriers & a full spectrum expeditionary army. Britain used to have a really big navy for the same reasons. And so Europe bitches and whines but ultimately, whatever the White House says gets listened to & broadly agreed with. Pax Americana is real & the kinda sorta ‘free world’ of more or less market economies will kinda sorta line up behind the USA as their trading partners against China when push comes to shove. It’s the geopolitical alliance of “places where you can actually drink the tap water” against everyone else.
USA doesn’t do this out of the goodness of its heart, just as Europe doesn’t go along with what the Yanks want because everyone loves the USA. It happens because there is a long term strategic interest in not moving towards a world that revolves around Peking or Moscow (or frankly New Delhi) rather than Washington DC.
I understand geopolitics just fine. And I understand geography. And I understand we are 33.7 trillion dollars in the red. And I understand Europe and NATO for years have leaned in the US to say “we have this common problem…but America can foot the bill and do the heavy lifting and then we’ll blast you later for being imperialists.” How about Europe do it for once. Russian isn’t going to roll tanks into North America any time in the near future, are they?
Stop being yet another welfare project for the taxpayers of the US to have to support. We’ve been doing it since the Marshall Plan and we can’t afford to do it any longer.
I’m think Steven nails it pretty well here, though I’m not so sure about the personal stuff at the end. FWIW, Steven, I am enjoying your comments.
As to Perry’s contention that we need this to continue Pax Americana, and keep Beijing and Moscow out of the seat of hegemony, I’m afraid that horse has long since bolted. The west is incapable of being a force for good because it thinks of itself as a force for evil. And I don’t just mean the politicians — they are always venal and evil — I mean huge swaths of the population think that too, so elections only make things worse. SinoPax seems inevitable to me now, and that is a scary prospect, given how those bastards keep the pax. However, given the insane levels of censorship in much of Europe I’m not sure it’ll be much of a change. Of course the Chinese would never put up with those horrifying demonstrations in favor of baby killing, Jew hating, rape loving Nazis. So maybe it’ll be an improvement.
Perhaps the only hope is that they will be consumed by their own contradictions — Queers for Hamas, indeed.
We might as well just acknowledge it, and make the position of the “world hegemon” a thing. The UK was doing it, before the US decided it could do the job better, and I really wish that the varied and sundry arseholes that voluntold the rest of us that we were gonna be doing it would have had their pee-pees slapped. Hard.
It’s a thankless job that bankrupts whoever undertakes it, and they usually undertake it in a haze of confused “self-interest” that proves, in the end, to be the “self-interest” of the ruling class of the nation. The common schmuck? Not so much… We get the dirty end of the stick, and wind up holding the line somewhere in some God-forsaken part of the world, while the “right people” enjoy their cocktail parties and luxury lifestyles.
A pox on all of their houses, say I.
You do have to wonder, from your worms-eye perspective, what the world would look like had the UK and the US eschewed the world hegemon thing. Free trade? Who cares? Let the tariffs ride; I don’t see any benefit to us having sent much of our industry to China, chasing lower labor costs. Likewise, freedom of navigation? What’s the point, when that navigation is just bringing in cheap goods that put my fellow citizens out of work?
Who really benefits from all this? Is it the common folk, average people like ourselves? Did I benefit from a lifetime of service, or would I have been better off doing something more… Productive?
The nation I thought I was signing up to defend looks a lot like an illusion, from my perspective these days. I’d have some pointed things to say to my 17-year-old self, were I to have that conversation with him.
What, pray tell, did the US and the UK gain from playing world hegemon during their times up at bat? Anything, aside from the anger of the people who benefited the most from it?
It’s really amusing to watch the various rants coming from Indian sources these days, talking about how England raped India, when the raw fact is that the majority of the “rape” was performed by other Indians, going back generations before the East India Company was even a gleam in anyone’s eye. You listen to them rant, and its as if they think the history of India started in 1800, or something equally bizarre and ahistorical. It’s all England’s fault, you see… No responsibility at all on the essentially grabtastic and utterly incompetent Indian nations that were so easily taken over and “abused” by the English. No responsibility, there. At. All. “We wuz victims!!!!”
You have to wonder what India would have looked like if the French had been left to their own devices, with zero competition from the UK. Be a bit of a shock for many of those Indians whining about the Raj to discover the counterfactual that they really were living out the best-case scenario.
India would probably still be mired in the same situation it had been in for millennia, had the Raj not happened. If nothing else, they should be grateful it broke the cycle of endless misery and turmoil…
At least Indian widows benefitted from the British being in India, so if nothing else there is that.
Fraser Orr wrote:
I didn’t mean for it to sound personal and if it did I apologize. I meant for Europe as a whole.
Thanks!
I was listening to a former PM of Israel being interviewed on fox. Regarding the defeat of Hamas he said “We’ll get the job done, we are not asking anyone else to do it. Just don’t ask us to stop in the middle.
I thought this was spot on.
Beware the Americocentric fallacy, not everything happens because of what the USA does or doesn’t do.
😉
There’s an additional underlying subtext concerning the USA and Ukraine that never gets mentioned, but I think it affects a great deal of public perception of the issue.
– Biden as VP and P has spent a lot of attention on Ukraine.
– As we began sending semi-loads of cash to Ukraine, the Biden Klan was bringing pickup truck loads of cash back from Ukraine, headed for Biden Klan bank accounts.
– This makes approximately half of America very distrusting of all things Ukraine.
Right now, Biden is the main poison in this soup. I think we could get behind a “break Russia” theme if we could get past the idea that all of that money was being thrown about specifically so that the US pols could harvest from it.
Indeed bobby, beware the Americocentric fallacy. Euromaidan did not happen because the USA engineered it, it happened because of internal Ukrainian & external Russian pressures. Brexit did not happen because the USA wanted it to (quite the contrary), it happened because of internal UK pressures & EU ineptitude.
The USA is top dog, but it’s not an actual empire, it’s a confluence of interests. And when those interests diverge, nations within the alliance do their own thing for better or worse. The USA sets the tone on the big stuff & reaps many benefits from that, such as being the ones printing the world’s reserve currency. But the “alliance of safe tap water nations” is riddled with contradictions & quirks, rather than masterminded from Langley as so many people seem to think (which probably included Putin). I never said the USA isn’t influential, it is very much is. My point is that really a lot of stuff happens overseas without so much as a by-your-leave from the State Department or CIA.
And if Ukraine ended up losing, it will change Europe very profoundly in several unfortunate ways seen very clearly in London, Warsaw, Prague, Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Zagreb, Vilnius, Riga & Tallinn; more or less seen in Washington & Madrid; dimly grasped in Belin, Rome & Paris. Ever less clear to me what the world looks like from Sofia & Bucharest. Vienna, Budapest & now Bratislava are in Russia’s rather threadbare pocket already. If Ukraine goes, people looking for USA to save a buck & disengage will get their wish. NATO will be over even if a zombie version staggers on for a while. It will also eventually split Europe into two blocs as well, which is why Poland is already arming to the teeth.
The critical error that Ukraine made was allowing itself to become a Democratic Party client. How that happened, I’ve already speculated, but it was a long-term error in that they’ve alienated everyone in the US who is against what the Clinton/Obama/Biden clique have gotten up to in the last twenty-odd years.
The point that they likely had no choice? Will be missed, by most. It’s a tragedy of history, I fear.
My own take on it is that there’s a hell of a lot we don’t know, namely how much influence Russia had with Biden. Given the historical track record of these assclowns, I rather suspect that the script was supposed to be “Russia invades, Ukraine collapses, Zelensky escapes into exile…”, and then Zelensky screwed that up by staying on to fight.
Where the hell we go from here? I have no idea; I rather hope that Ukraine has a “poison pill” ready to go that will put the knife into the Biden Krime Krewe’s back good and deep.
I know that there were Ukrainian law enforcement types that were trying to get evidence to the Trump administration who were blocked from coming into the US by the State Department. Given what else has been going on…? I have no idea what is actually happening behind the surfaces reported in open sources, but you can definitely see the patterns beneath the surface indicating that all is not going on in accordance with the “accepted narrative”.
They really have no choice, given the Democratic Party is in power in the USA.
No doubt a more extensive quote would have shown the concern for the Ukrainian people, and how they too deserve a vote in this matter, and it would be the perfect time to ensure an open and honest presidential election in Ukraine. Ha, just kidding. None of that matters to the western commentariat & leaders.
Perry:
WRT Rome it is worth noting that Giorgia seems to have taken a strong stance for Ukraine, in spite of the Putinist sympathies of her coalition allies.
Not all Italians feel the same way, but when the M5S (5-Star Movement) took the “better red than dead” position, Giorgia invoked 2 national heroes, Falcone and Borsellino, who died for freedom from the Mafia, and was applauded in Parliament.
But i’d like to know more about Prague: I read that there was a demo against aid to Ukraine. How representative is that of the mood of the country?
It’s not a question of the US penny pinching and letting Ukraine fail. It’s a question of telling Europe “it’s a war in Europe; you pay for it for once. You (meaning Europe) haven’t held up your end of the NATO agreement since the fall of the USSR and now you’re going to have to pay the piper for once instead of relying on Uncle Sam to pick up the tab.”
If stopping Russia is that important, then step up and stop Russia. There is zero reason the US should have paid double what Europe as a whole has paid, and let’s face it, there is no end in sight and the US simply no longer can afford it. Our economy is falling apart in front of our eyes as it is, we have China on the horizon, and Biden and his handlers are incapable of leading.
Europe needs to take the lead in dealing with a European problem for once instead of just relying on the US to keep writing blank checks.
@Steven R,
I think it might be worth pointing out that the whole “US defending Europe…” thing is a bit of an own-goal. The US didn’t want to have to re-fight WWII in twenty years, sooooooo… The idea was to distract the Europeans and keep them quiescent while the US picked up the tab, which they figured would result in a longer peace. Which, I’ll point out, we got.
The trouble is, the bright lights of the early days did not consider what the long-term expenses were going to be, and those proved to be a bit, shall we say… High. Which we’ve continually tried to slough off onto the Euros, but they’re not hearing it, having latched onto that social welfare tit like a tick on a dog’s ass.
We got just what we asked for, and are now trying to get the deal changed. Europe hasn’t dragged the US into a major war, and didn’t even get us into a minor campaign for the first forty or so years of the alliance. Decent return on the money, I’d say.
The other thing is, be careful what you ask for: The Europe that is paying its own way for defense may not be a Europe that is also an American ally. There were reasons we tied the apron-strings to them, and they’re worth remembering.
End of the day, the US has interests in a Europe that isn’t capable of defending itself. Cruel, but true.
I accept that the US has interests in Europe. Fine. But NATO was built on each member contributing by having standing forces and spending a minimum 2% of each state’s GDP on their military and the fact is since the end of the Soviet Union a bunch of states haven’t, including the ones like Germany that are going to be on the front line if the Russians keep rolling westward. Yes, some of them helped out some in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re discussing today. The Germans have about 120 IFVs that are usable right now. That’s a regiment or brigade. They have about two battalions of armor. All things considered, that’s not all that much.
It’s almost like they had to choose between guns and butter and said “we’ll choose butter because American will buy the guns for us if they’re needed.” They’re needed now only we can’t provide for Europe, us, Taiwan, Korea, Ukraine, and our own butter. Yet we’re told that if we don’t bleed ourselves white financially for Ukraine because it’s somehow our job, then we just don’t care about Russia and global politics and all of that. I’m just saying Europe’s chickens are coming home to roost. They should have been doing what their NATO treaty obligations required and haven’t and now that it matters Europe can only do what they’ve been doing for decades: say it’s America’s responsibility to do the heavy lifting and foot the bill.
I’m not saying the US should not support Ukraine or that Russian shouldn’t be stopped, but I am saying we simply can’t afford to shoulder the responsibility on our own. Europe should at the very least be spending the same amount as the US, not half of what we’ve spent, and then tell us we aren’t on board with the program.
if Ukraine is that bloody important to Europe, then Europe needs to pull its weight.
Oh, I agree with you, Steven.
It’s just that the situation is a bit more complex than “carrying your own weight”.
The Euros deserve a thorough ass-raping, TBH. Not all of them, by any means, but a hell of a lot of them.
They seem to want to have their cake, and eat it, too. The worst offenders by far are the French and the Germans, followed by the Belgians. If you went digging through the buildings at Camp Speicher, you could find copious evidence that the Germans, French, and Belgians had been ignoring the sanctions, shipping in all sorts of contraband goodies. And, that’s been the European path to profit around the world: Piously pronounce the US is an aggressor nation, and then enable the people the US is trying to stop from causing trouble, like the Iranians. Ever wonder where all that nifty Iranian military hardware comes from? The Euros sold it to them, either directly or as machinery to build it.
So, they make money by not paying for their own defense, which is subsidized by the American taxpayer, and they make bigger profits by selling US opponents sanctioned gear and by helping them work around the financial controls. You don’t want to know what was going on with the whole “Oil-for-Food” scam; you’d be sickened by it. And, of course, when the US went into Iraq and got reamed by all those sanctimonious assholes, we had to do all the things that were supposed to be paid for by Oil-for-Food, like refurbish and update the water treatment plant there in Tikrit… Which we wound up having to do like three times, ‘cos those “Freedom-fighting insurgents” kept blowing the place up and killing the managers…
All made easier by our “allies”, who were the ones who really profited from Iraqi oil, what with us putting it out to the highest bidder and discouraging US companies from getting involved. Another tacit quid-pro-quo with our European “Allies”.
I’m right there with you, in thinking they ought to pay their own way, but I’m also somewhat afraid of what the pricks would be doing if they didn’t have to worry about us actually defending them when the time came… If a dependent Europe does this sort of thing now, what would a free-agent Europe be doing?
Be wary of getting what you ask for. You might be asking for an ass-raping, and not realize it at the time.
The problem with making a deal with Mr Putin is that he can not be trusted – he would break his word as soon as it suits him to do so, he is a Gangster.
Crimea is a vital interest for Russia – it has been for centuries, and that means secure supply and communication routes to Crimea, water supplies and so on.
Even if the Gangster Mr Putin vanished, Crimea would remain. In the 1950s it was assigned to Ukraine but that was a purely administrative measure, the Soviet Union was really one country the “autonomy” of Soviet Ukraine was a lie.
I do not see any Russian government, even if the Gangster Mr Putin is killed, compromising on Crimea – or on secure supply lines to Crimea. This is a matter of the Russian people – not just a particular government.
If possible we need to avoid thermonuclear war – it is true that some Western cities are falling apart anyway and are increasingly filled with non Westerners, but thermonuclear war with tens of millions of dead human beings should not be treated lightly – it would be a moral outrage. I know about the various agendas to radically reduce population, especially in the industrial West, but thermonuclear war would be a horrible way of pushing such an agenda (which is a mad agenda anyway). As for some sort of agenda to break up Russia – that is very much the same sort of madness (and would lead to thermonuclear war), Western governments have made it very clear (repeatedly) that there is no agenda to break up Russia – the dispute is with Mr Putin, not with the Russian people.
The problem remains that Mr Putin can not be trusted – he might make an agreement to secure Crimea, and secure supply and communication lines to Crimea, but he would break the agreement as soon it suited him to do so – to try and take all of Ukraine.
Remember at the start of his offensive in 2022 – Kiev was clearly the objective.
There is a lot of rewriting of history going on now – but the war that Mr Putin launched did NOT have limited objectives – the objective was clearly Kiev itself.
The great dangers to Russia do NOT include Ukraine – there are two great dangers to Russia, Islam and the People’s Republic of China, and Mr Putin has tried to make friends with both.
Mr Putin may think he is very clever – “if you make friends with enemies they are, by definition, no longer enemies”, but he can not change the basic facts.
These are the real threats to the Russian people – and it is the Russian people that Mr Putin has betrayed.
Ukrainians are the natural brothers and sisters of Russians – and Mr Putin has turned them into enemies. And Islam and the People’s Republic of China are the real threats to the Russian people, and Mr Putin’s alliance with them is horribly misguided.
Hey Perry,
After 4K US dead, a few trillion dollars, and who knows how many Iraqi dead, our Sec of State has to visit Iraq in the middle of the night in body armor.
https://twitter.com/hammerofjason/status/1722068995690422395
At least the George W Bush War on Terror you supported prevented us from having to deal with people celebrating terrorist activities like the Hamas attack on Israel …. oh, wait, you got the war you wanted and we now have thousands cheering for terrorists in Western streets.
Its almost like the govt fucked up fighting terrorism exactly the way those of us who opposed the Iraq war said they’d fuck it up – just like they fuck up everything else.
Its been a decade since I told you that you were an idiot for supporting W’s invasion of Iraq. I was clearly right.
— Scott
What the hell does that have to do with people supporting Hamas? You think if the Baathists were still ruling Iraq like they are in Syria & USA had done nothing after 9/11, there would be peace in the Middle East? 😀
Do I want Ukraine to win? If it doesn’t involve nuclear weapons, yes.
What the hell does that have to do with people supporting Hamas? You think if the Baathists were still ruling Iraq like they are in Syria & USA had done nothing after 9/11, there would be peace in the Middle East?
You got the war you wanted, a bunch of people died, Iraq is still an unsafe mess, and people are in London cheering terrorism. You failed. Your war failed. You changed the name of the person running Iraq. Yay for you.
So… what should have been done? Imagine you get what you wanted & Saddam Hussein is still running Iraq (& presumably Kuwait as well), and Taliban got nothing more than official grimaces in response to 9/11. Tell me what you think the world would look like now. Peaceful? Better? Arabs & Jews kissing in the streets of London?
Perry – kicking Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 (when the American military was at its peak) was clearly the right thing to do, I supported it then and I support it now.
As for overthrowing Saddam in 2003 – if one believed what both Mr Bush and Mr Blair were told by their advisers, that Islam was a religion of peace, that made perfect sense as well. And as anyone who cast doubt on that proposition was screamed at as a “racist” (I was baffled by that – as Islam is not a race) President Bush never got to hear an “Islamophobic” point of view – he held to what he had been taught, that the population of Afghanistan and Iraq were peaceful people oppressed by a small group who had perverted a peaceful religion – much like the Japanese regime had, from the late 19th century, perverted Shrine Shinto into State Shinto (taking a peaceful nature religion and making it about conquest), so like Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II – Afghanistan and Iraq would become good peaceful countries, if only this small group of wicked oppressors was removed.
If I believed what President Bush believed, what all the “experts” told him, I would have done what he did. And, I repeat, I am fairly sure that President Bush never heard a contrary opinion on the nature of Islam and on Middle Eastern culture. By the way, Saddam himself started off as a fairly secular socialist – he became more Islamic over time because he had to (or lose power).
On Ukraine – there are repeated stories that the election is to be cancelled, that would be a terrible mistake (remember America continued to have elections even during the Civil War – which killed a much higher proportion of Americans than the war with Mr Putin has killed Ukrainians).
The great line of Ukraine against Russia is “your elections are rigged – our elections are real” – if President Z. really does “cancel the election” then that line of superiority is flung away.
It would, for example, be incredibly difficult to get aid-for-Ukraine through the American Congress if the Ukrainian election is cancelled.
To cancel the election would, therefore, be risking losing the war.
The way George Bush handled 9/11 was predicated on a certain worldview that permeated the Bush administration there at the beginning, one that was delusional in that they thought the media and world opinion didn’t matter. It did, because the incessant yammering about “No WMD”, even though it was among the greatest lies ever sold, led directly to Obama winning the election in 2008 and undoing all the work accomplished by Bush.
He signed us up for a fifty-year commitment, akin to what we did in Germany and Japan. Unfortunately, he did not get “buy in” from the perfidious and odious Democratic Party, so as soon as he left office, they started sabotaging the entire thing, tearing it down. You could see what was coming in the way that the Obama crew started meddling with the deployment rosters for Iraq and Afghanistan both red-Xing all the planned mentoring and oversight elements that were supposed to help the military in both nations continue to develop. They cut literally thousands of men from that, creating chaos in the ranks. It led directly to the corruption taking over in both armies, and how those armies later collapsed under the weight of corruption and bad leadership. They never had a chance, because the men who were supposed to prevent that never got there to do their jobs.
They also sabotaged everything they could, while piously saying they were doing their best. Obama’s people deliberately and with malice aforethought wrecked the Status of Forces Agreement negotiations with the Iraqi government, which led to the US withdrawal of combat forces. That was deliberate; they just told the Iraqis that things were non-negotiable, and when the Iraqis tried to negotiate some things, they pulled out and went home.
The collapse of both Iraq and Afghanistan were controlled demolitions very much in the same way that the collapse of South Vietnam was, conducted along the same lines by many of the same people.
Bush’s essential mistake was thinking in the WWII/Korea mold, wherein the silly man thought that domestic politics ended at the water’s edge. He was wrong; they weaponized the whole thing against him and his policies, then wrecked them. It’s possible that they weren’t ever likely to succeed, but the fact is, we’ll never know because they were thoroughly and deliberately dismantled by the incoming Democrat, Obama.
Bush was a realist that didn’t want to kill billions, which would have likely been the result if he’d gone after the real responsible parties for 9/11: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan would have likely nuked India, and Saudi Arabia would have pulled a Samson routine with their oil fields, resulting in taking all that oil and fertilizer off the world market, which would have had the follow-on effect of starving billions in Africa and Asia. Instead of that, Bush chose a ju-jitsu indirect attack on both parties, taking the toys away from the ISI in Afghanistan, and then trying to plant a real Arab democracy on the monarchy’s doorstep. Which, if followed through with, would have resulted in some interesting follow-on effects, had it worked. Which it wasn’t going to because his domestic enemies refused to allow it to proceed… Just like the Abraham Accords with Trump.
US domestic politics are profoundly evil, at this moment in history, and the majority of the responsibility for that lies in the hands of the Democratic Party. The Republicans are mostly just inept naifs, easily manipulated by the more Machiavellian and cunning Democrats who lead them around by the nose. And, if they’re not naifs, then they’re usually working hand-in-glove with the Democrats, for the scraps left behind. The whole thing is just disgusting, when you look at it all.
In any event, the Bush plans didn’t work, and he was incredibly naive for thinking they would. This ain’t the 1940s, and the Democrats aren’t American patriots these days. They’re mostly opportunistic thugs with no real goals other than perpetuating their own political power, or they wouldn’t have pulled what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, for that matter, Ukraine…
It didn’t help that Cheney and Rumsfeld seems to have really thought that removing Saddam and just stepping in was going to be a situation like stepping into Berlin and Tokyo post-WW2. Germany and Japan had been bombed flat and agreed to whatever terms were put their way just to get the bombs to stop. We intentionally didn’t bomb Baghdad flat. We also expected the locals to just decide to build a new country in our image forgetting that while Iraq technically had a democratic tradition, the locals were too concerned with their sectarian politics and getting payback than they were with building a new country. The brain trust Bush counted on simply didn’t expect what happened after the celebrations in Iraq were over after Saddam was ousted and his sons were clipped. They should have had someone saying “what if the Iraqis don’t follow the game plan?” but given how Cheney and Rumsfeld worked U doubt the message would have even been heard, which they should have considering by the time we went into Iraq we had been in Afghanistan for a year and a half and knew replacing a government in an Islamic country just isn’t an easy task.
In retrospect, Bush was poorly served by the GOP in forcing Cheney and Rumsfeld on him, but that’s water under the bridge.
I was there and involved in a lot of the low-level planning and preparation for the post-war era. Also, there for the execution thereof.
The worst-case they anticipated was that Iraq would be “Southern Italy/Sicily bad” in terms of having local civil governance to work with. Afghanistan was discounted as a model because it was essentially a non-existent state to begin with, and they didn’t expect all that much to be there.
Iraq, though? I dunno… I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the actual situation on the ground we ran into. Everything had been run from Baghdad; even the local government wouldn’t say “Boo!” without someone from Baghdad telling them it was OK. There was zero self-governing going on; it was all anarchy, all the time. Who the hell would anticipate people breaking in and looting the water plant they all relied on for clean water? Who’d expect half the idiocies that they came up with, out in the population? It was Mad Max on steroids; Lord of the Flies lived out in real time.
We had limited expectations of the Iraqis in the first place, but those were exponentially optimistic. The population was self-destructive and kleptomanic to a degree you can’t really even wrap your head around, constantly acting against their own self-interest time and time again, then expecting the US to just magically un-f*ck whatever it was they’d done.
Couple of the civil government specialists had nervous breakdowns, dealing with those clowns. The ones that lasted had to cultivate a sense of the absurd, and just roll with the punches. If you cared, you had problems coping with it all. Part of that was over-optimistic projections, but a larger part was just sheer “WTF” that I doubt anyone without access to a working time machine could have possibly anticipated.
Bremer’s decision to do away with the existing Iraqi Army often gets excoriated, but I think it was one of those deals where you had no good decisions to make; leaving them up and running would have sent a signal to the Shia Muslims of Iraq that nothing had changed, and that they were going to keep getting screwed. It also wouldn’t have been too likely to have been able to graft a new, functioning Iraqi Army onto all that dysfunctional proto-Soviet BS they had going, which along with Arab cultural influences, produced a horrid organization that thrived on corruption and abuse of the troops, who were usually Shia while the officers were mostly Sunni…
I honestly don’t think there’s a damn thing that anyone could have done ahead of time to “fix” the occupation. That’s just one of those things that was far worse than anyone was capable of imagining, likely one of the most “worst case” situations in terms of occupation and military government that you could encounter in history. Being as I’m not God himself, I’m not going to fault anyone else for failing to predict all that.
In the end, though… We did make it work, and I think the Iraq that resulted would have been a much different place than now, had the Obama clique not deliberately cut the feet out from under the effort.
I always assumed the US would adopt the British model for Afghanistan. Demolish the locals army (first try didn’t go well, subsequent attempts a bit better), then appoint a local psycho as boss with a vested interest in remaining boss & then get the fuck out after telling him ‘off camera’: “Do what you want but we’ll be back & unmake you if you do the following…” (In Britain’s case, “don’t fuck around our side of the Khyber”).
None of that state-building malarkey as if it was Germany/Japan in 1946.
Nope. Washington has been full on “inside every [INSERT BROWN OR YELLOW NATIONALITY HERE] is an American just waiting to get out” since the 1950s. They never learn that a lot of people simply despise Western values and traditions like democracy and rights and the value of the individual.
And every single time we’re installed some strongman it has ended up going sideways for us, yet Foggy Bottom and Langley keep on doing the same things over and over.
Not to mention a legal system that pretty much worked, railways they are still using, land registries, etc. etc.
At least the West got those great Bollywood action films with the insane stunts and smash cuts in them. I mean, seeing a guy slide under a moving semi on an obviously fake horse is just the best.
Perry de Havilland said:
Steven R said:
Excellent points, but…
To quibble with Perry, the center of gravity for Afghanistan was never addressed, because it was in Pakistan. The fact that bin Laden was found and killed in Abbottabad should be everyone’s first clue that Afghanistan had jack and squat to do with 9/11. That was always the Pakistani ISI, who at the least of it, had to have known it was going to happen. We never went after the center of gravity in that war, either strategically or tactically. The insanity of giving Pakistan military aid while they were training, equipping, and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan was just… Nuts. They never, ever addressed that fact, and someone with some integrity and concern for the troops should have fallen on their sword in front of the media and Congress, saying “WTF are we doing, here…?”
That none of our senior officers of any service did that tells you all you need to know about their competence and integrity. Ya wonder why they’re having recruiting problems, these days? Yeah; there ya go, right there…
Afghanistan should never have been a “thing”. It should have been a wake-up call to Pakistan, delivered by B-52 bombers that destroyed everything for several square miles around every single ISI office and base, followed by a nuclear curettage of their nuclear weapons sites. After 9/11, that’s what should have been done, first… Then a subsequent discussion with the Saudi ambassador telling them that either the parties responsible for giving clean passports to the hijackers and then vetting them for visas got turned over for summary execution in front of the American people, or Riyadh was going to glow in the dark.
Had they done that, then the odds are pretty good we’d survive the next century without use of WMD by non-state actors. As it is, that is exponentially more likely now than before 9/11 and its obvious “how-to” for getting away with attacking a major power without any return fire. If you think that the ass-clowns of Iran and Hamas are not emboldened by that, and likely planning similar such shenanigans on US soil as we speak…? You’re dangerously naive.
Bush is going to be remembered more for that than anything else. He basically ripped the guts out of Westphalian sovereignty, and nobody noticed or criticized him for it. That’s a mistake that’s going to echo down the ages, my friends.
As to the American proclivity for thinking everyone is just like them, and all that? I dunno… A lot of us don’t think that way, but the idiots we put in charge demonstrably do think that way.
On the other hand, they’ve screwed things up by the numbers so consistently, you have to wonder if it’s not actually “enemy action” rather than simple stupidity and misadventure. To be crass about it, if you keep going back to the forest for the bear to ass-rape you, the question should eventually be asked “Are you here for the hunting, or are you here for the ass-raping…?”
Once is bad luck. Twice is coincidence. Three times? Time to start looking for the mole or spy in your operations, because that’s enemy action you’re observing.