An interesting opinion piece on the war in Ukraine.
Can We Have Some Real Talk About Ukraine?
Spot on with the Libs. For the Cons, I would clarify that applies to the neocons.Time to get real. Ukraine is an equal opportunity crisis because it provides politicians of both parties a chance to be wrong, although it allows the Democrats the opportunity to do what they do best and be much, much more wrong. For the Republicans, it lets them indulge the desire of some to return to a time when America could focus its moral firepower – if not its firepower firepower – upon a readily-identifiable baddie like it did during the Cold War or the War on Terror. For the left, it allows them to create a moral panic to replace COVID, which, naturally, requires that we Americans "sacrifice" even more of our freedom and money.
I split this paragraph for emphasis.From the perspective of someone who actually trained Ukrainian troops in Ukraine, commanded US forces, and attended the US Army War College – though it's kind of the Chico State of war colleges – the whole way our elite is approaching the crisis is an epic clusterfark.
Oh no! He brought up NATO expansion and history!Don't believe anything anyone tells you – and certainly, sanity check whatever I'm telling you, too – most of these insta-experts on intra-Slavic conflict know absolutely squat-ski. Moreover, their remarkably dumb observations and credulous acceptance of conventional wisdom, which has proven long on conventional and short on wisdom, are being presented without any kind of strategic context. They don't know where this crisis came from and certainly have no clear notion of where they want it to go beyond the vague and unhelpful idea that they want Putin (which they use interchangeably with Russia) to "lose" without knowing what that even means.
Biases are important, and here are mine. I sympathize with the Ukrainian people, partly because I worked with them and partly because I was an end-stage Cold Warrior who came up training to fight Russians. I understand that this mess is not merely the result of Putin being bad or Trump being insufficiently anti-Putin, like LTC Sausage and the rest of the failed foreign policy elite and regime media insist. Putin's badness plays a part, but he's merely exploiting thousands of years of bloody history, of ethnic hatred, and of Orthodox mysticism, as well as totally misguided and poorly-considered Western interference. The idea that we could just make Ukraine part of NATO and the Russians would just lump it is remarkable for its dumbness, but it is fully in keeping with our foreign policy elite's unbroken track record of failure since the old-school military's victory in the Gulf War – something I discuss in-depth in my upcoming Regnery book "We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America." My bottom line is that the Ukrainians are imperfect, and regardless of whether the Russians have some quasi-legit beefs in some cosmic sense, you don't solve them by sending in a couple hundred thousand mechanized soldiers.
The rest is about the poor way that Russia is fighting their war. I mentioned before that Putin was playing WWII Soviet battle. Don't let your armor out distance your infantry. You need the infantry to take out the enemies infantry that is armed with anti-tank weapons.
More at the link.
"Putin bad" is true, but it's insufficient. It's time for some real talk about America's interests, which may not be Ukraine's interests, and how we are pursuing them. Except no one wants to talk about that because that's not fun. Moral panics are, and stopping for a second to think strategically spoils the party for many in both parties.