Dear Citizens of the Republic:
It’s been some time, mid-April, since my last posting. I haven’t been on furlough, but wanted to pick my next posting time to match the flows inside the War on Ukraine and the intensifying, foul political mood in the United States.
There has been a flurry of pieces on the war in the New York Times: from its Editorial board; historian Timothy Snyder; and Senator Mitt Romney. Over at Project Syndicate, there have been posts by Yanis Varoufakis and then a long piece by George Soros. On the more distant horizon, Henry Kissinger has been sounding close to the Times; as always, smaller nations beware the squeeze. The immediate trigger to get me writing again, however, was coverage in the Times of the growing world food crisis triggered by the Russian blockade of shipments of stored Ukrainian grain by boat, and the attacks on eastern rail yard heads near the present Donbas battle lines. This was the signal which I read as signifying that Russia is willing to wage a much wider war to crush Ukraine , and if that means starvation for millions of people, thousands of miles away from the theatre of war, but dependent on Ukrainian agriculture and its export, so be it implies Putin. The butcher of Syria and Chechnya is not going to be moved on humanitarian grounds.
The West has counted on squeezing Russia economically; it is not clear to me though, given the tools in Russian hands and its willingness to use them – critical fossil fuels and food grains – that the squeeze isn’t going to end up with Russia causing more economic pain in the word, and the West, than vice versa.
Putin’s the man then, that the NY Times is urging President Zelensky to come to terms with, and not very subtly: the man who has ordered the shelling and destruction of 300 medical facilities, killed thousands of civilians directly , and has deported reportedly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians against their wills to Russia and an unknow fate. And the fate of about 2,000 soldiers and civilians who surrendered at the Azoustal Steel Plant between May 16-18th… any bettors that they will be well treated amidst cries from some Russian governmental quarters to put the soldiers on trial for war crimes? Or that they will not suffer the fate of those who surrendered to the Nazis in the Warsaw uprising, August-October, 1944, the fate the West would rather not recall – nor Russians? “Just couldn’t get to them.” (For the full, but perhaps not final story, see historian Norman Davies 2003 work, “Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw.” It’s a great but painful read, and good background for all the not very noble politics that went on in Britain and in Moscow over aid to the revolt. I would say definitive always pending revision by discovery of new archives or memoirs. And Davies is a superb writer. Perhaps time to get to his history of Poland, since Poland is slowly moving back into the center of European politics as the Putin threat looms larger and larger. The dedication at the opening of Rising ’44 reads: “To Warsaw – and to all who fight tyranny regardless.“)
Ironically, on the very day that the NY Times ran their caution flag urging that the war must eventually end with Ukraine giving ground, figuratively and literally, May 19th, saw Professor Snyder’s piece entitled “Russia is Fascist. We Should Say it.” Professor Snyder should know, even without an ironclad definition of the F word acceptable to all emerging; but he’s studied enough variations of the beast to recognize a new branch of the family when it emerges, ironically from the same “soil” as the ideological polar opposite which drove fascist Nazi Germany out of Russia between 1942-1945. Snyder’s piece starts slowly, builds its evidence and ends with the declarative voice of a sledgehammer, one I hope troubles the Biden administration and NATO equally: “Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted…If Ukraine doe not win, we can expect decades of darkness.”
Compare that to the Times signal that American elites have had enough: “A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.”
Let’s compare that to Mr. Soros’ own bluntness, his dissent :
“We must mobilize all our resources to bring the war to an early end. The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin. That’s the bottom line.”
Update June 1, 2022:
Editor’s Note: June 1, 2022: President Biden himself had a piece in yesterday’s NY Times which I did not try to answer in the public comments where I usually weigh in, weekly at least. Why, since this was intended as a major “policy” statement? Well, what you’re reading now in this current posting is my answer to the very grey and uncertain areas still left murky by Biden’s “clarifications.” And that is, if the stalemate or worse continues, will the U.S. still never send troops (especially if Ukrainian troops are on the verge of being surrounded) or supply air cover? Biden is still signaling what he will and won’t do to Putin in advance, something a leader never should do in situations as ambiguous and fluid as this one, as opposed to Churchill’s defiant speeches telling the Nazis that Britain would fight on – “alone” to the end, including against a German invasion of their island home.
I’ve been thinking even before Biden’s speech to propose this: what if the U.S. sends 3-5 military hospitals with big Red Crosses on them, staffed with our military medical personnel, which I understand is a pressing need due to the high but not enumerated (for morale reasons) casualty toll from the front in the Donbas. Putin can hardly view that as an invasion threat, and since he has attacked some 300 medical facilities prior to this, civilian even, it is an open question what he will do, and I mean it to be that way: put the burden on him to escalate. We would then have good cause to protect those hospitals in any way we thought necessary: boots on the ground and/or that fabled, dangerous No Fly Zone…
The dispatch of the rocket launchers is some clarification to a week or more of confusing press accounts, but in the speech it didn’t clear up the point I had raised: would the US be supplying thermobaric warheads for those rockets? And what if Russia switches to still more distant rocket and missile launches to attack troops and civilian areas, back in Russian or Belarus territory? What then…sit there and take it Ukraine? It seems to me in international law (with all its limitations) it’s pretty clear that the violated party in a territorial invasion has the right to attack the sources of the troops and supplies fueling that invasion. (and surely Putin’s military at least knows there will be no full scale ground attack on Russia). So, despite the President’s speech and everyone’s hopes, it still not clear that Ukraine can push the Russian out to either the status quo before Feb. 24, 2022, or the much better and sustainable boundaries of 1991.
Further update, June 1, 2022 The New York Times is reporting this morning that the rocket system greenlighted from the US to Ukraine includes a system that has a range of 200 miles. If true, that’s what’s needed to get at the source of a portion of the incoming, being launched at some distance from the Ukraine. That’s the strongest signal yet sent by the President within the other parameters he has announced on troops and air cover not being supplied.
The confusion continues into Wednesday afternoon, June 1st: Reuters is reporting that the Biden administration only agreed to send this rocket systems with the understanding that they would not be fired into Russia and the range given was 40 miles or so max, a whole another range than the 200 miles in the NYTimes. Maybe the reporters just don’t know how important that “detail” is. So the points I raised are still at issue and I haven’t changed my mind on what I wrote. Maybe citizens of the US and Western Europe should ask: what would Israel do if it were in Ukraine’s situation, as it was during the opening phases of the 1973 Yom Kippur War of October of 1973? I think we know the answer…
Now I have once again jumped in to comment on these pieces in the NY Times, at Project Syndicate and at a BBC and CNN pieces at YouTube. Because this posting has grown larger than I anticipated, I’ll spare you from those published comments, but for now know my position has not changed based on the battlefield dispositions this last week in May, in the Donbas and along the Ukrainian coastline: the US is at war with Russia, and so is most of NATO, like it or not, and sooner or later, sooner given the Russia attack on world food supplies (isn’t that a crime in itself?) the US, Britain, France and Poland (notice I didn’t say Germany or NATO) will have to put boots on the ground and implement a campaign to clear the skies over Ukraine of Russian forces, which includes, by the structure of modern warfare, electronics, counter-measures and anti-aircraft missiles, striking Russian dispositions in Belarus and likely, miles into Russian territory itself. The troops could be used in a number of ways, to protect trains and railheads for the grain, of course, but most will be necessary first to install and protect the systems necessary to win the skies from Russia. And don’t be surprised, before we get to the end of this struggle if we see the ground support, anti-armor A-10 Warthogs in service and flown by the American pilots who known them best. This will unfold in steps, and “legally,” it proceeds with the basic humanitarian mission to feed the hungry world and leads to the most feared word in the hands of Foreign Policy magazine, the one which has frozen the West from taking any of the decisive steps that might rile up Putin even further; thus the Times editorial quotes Avril Haines, US Director of National Intelligence, fearing “a more unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory.” Which is where Joe Biden started out just before the invasion by sighing “don’t take too big a bite” and don’t worry, we’ll squeeze economically but not too hard, but no boots on the ground and no planes in the air. Unfortunately for the people and physical world of the Ukraine (hospitals and housing, bridges, schools, airports…) those boots have been Russian ones on their throats, and the aerial warfare which our Pentagon professionals keep saying isn’t decisive, is the theatre of warfare systematically taking apart hospitals, apartment complexes and now threatening starvation by attacking rail lines after demolishing the city next to the lost port of Mariupol, and raining, from time to time only, so far, down upon Odesa.
At this point, it is by no means clear that Ukraine is winning or will win a prolonged struggle.
Update from Friday, May 27, 2022. I saw two videos on U-tube, the first here, suggesting that Russia is using thermobaric weapons to destroy well entrenched Ukrainian troops holding the Donbas Eastern Front. These weapons come in a variety of sizes from artillery shells and mobile rocket systems to one ton bombs dropped from aircraft (or larger); whether they have been used by long range Russian ballistic missiles or in their new hypersonic missiles has not been talked about. Adding credibility to the alleged use by Russia via mobile rocket launchers (The Tos-1 system) was a follow up story at Sky News the same day discussing the debate of two weeks standing: the US has been considering sending our own mobile rocket launchers to Ukraine.
And here is the video with a retired British military officer who now is a CEO in the private sector, surfacing the US debate which I had not picked up elsewhere:
The take-away from this brief flash of information about debates inside our own government is that once again, if the Ukrainian accounts are true of thermobaric bomb use, and I just saw the allegation repeated today, Friday, May 27the in the NY Times, then the US and the West (a subset of NATO) are reacting once again to what Putin does, always fearful of the “escalatory” staircase where Putin draws the red lines from the higher steps.
Readers can take a quick 9 minute online course from a MD on the nature of thermobaric weapons here, as I did before this post, and what it tells me is that if Putin choses to use this weapon systematically to break up defenses holding him off in Donbas, and elsewhere, then there is little chance for Ukraine to win. And so, once again, the US and Joe Biden will face the crucial fact: we are at war with Russia, and they will win by gaining such a strategic hold of Ukraine without having to conquer all of the country, that it will be an economic boa-constrictor grip of that nation, and much of the nation will be in ruins.
You know what I think is our only recourse to that. Professor Snyder and George Soros have stated it pretty clearly in generic terms and emotions – and left me in a way, to fill in the details of what that means. I don’t find too many voices, certainly none on the left, declaring that we are already at war.
As I continue to work on this posting, confirmation of the use of thermobaric weapons, via rocket launched systems by the Russians in the Donbas, and the Ukrainian reverse use of Russian systems they have captured, is in the NY Times here on Saturday, May 28, 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/28/world/russia-ukraine-war#it-destroys-bunkers-russia-systematically-uses-thermobaric-warheads-in-ukraine
Sources:
Here are the major articles I referred to:
Yanis Varoufakis:
George Soros: “The Fight of Our Lives”
Let me close this section of the posting, the part on the war in Ukraine, war on Ukraine, with three final signal flares for failed policy. I’ll do that chronologically.
First, I’ve seen many references to a major 5,000 word essay published by Putin in July of 2021 (just about the time Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Manchin were playing ring-around-the-Manchin-Memo with Joe Biden, early on the road to futility for US domestic policy) but I was reluctant to download or link to it for you since the source is the Russian state site itself. However, over at the Atlantic Council think tank, Peter Dickinson, the Ukraine policy lead did have a post I can link to safely and it was entitled “The World Cannot Ignore Putin’s Ukraine’s obsession.” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-world-cannot-ignore-putins-ukraine-obsession/
Dickinson is quite blunt, given his dual role in policy – and economics – in Ukraine as well – and he’s worth quoting with more than one line:
“Far from seeking to promote understanding and reconciliation between the two nation’s, the Russian leader’s article reads like a justification for an even larger war…
This unambiguously imperialistic approach to Ukraine shines through in this his latest essay, which is as close as we are ever likely to get to a declaration of war against the entire notion of Ukrainian statehood… His menacing essay is a reminder of the need for strong messages of deterrence from Western leaders.
This summer’s thirtieth anniversary of Ukrainian independence presents the democratic world with the ideal opportunity to answer Putin’s recent treatise.”
So five months later, in December of 2021, but still more than two and a half months before Russian troops plunged across the borders again this is what we got from President Biden:
Here are the first two paragraphs of the article, the day after the phone summit with Putin concluded:
“Joe Biden has said that he is not considering sending US troops to defend Ukraine in response to a Russian military buildup on the country’s borders.
‘That is not on the table,’ he told reporters on Wednesday, one day after speaking directly with Vladimir Putin in an effort to avert a military crisis.”
And then in the last public dissent from Biden Administration policy on “boots and air,” here in March, 2022, 27 Foreign Policy experts called for a “No Fly Zone” to relive the siege of Mariupol:
According to the Stars and Stripes article, these were not all “civilians,” they included two former senior military commanders in Europe:
“Retired Gen. Phil Breedlove, who oversaw U.S. European Command from 2013 to 2016, and retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army Europe commander from 2014 to 2017, signed the undated letter along with 25 other foreign policy experts.
‘NATO leaders should convey to Russian officials that they do not seek direct confrontation with Russian forces, but they must also make clear that they will not countenance Russian attacks on civilian areas,’ the letter says. ‘What we seek is the deployment of American and NATO aircraft not in search of confrontation with Russia but to avert and deter Russian bombardment that would result in massive loss of Ukrainian lives.'”
Well, here I am writing over the Memorial Day weekend, Saturday, May 28th, 2022 and the casualties in the Donbas for the Ukrainian forces are so severe they are not being mentioned other than to convey a sense of unsustainability, as the government pleads for more Western arms to match the pounding coming from Russian thermobaric weapons and massed conventional artillery – the later being Russian specialty which helped defeat the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in WWII. Unmentioned in the acknowledgement which said we’re going to be sending longer range rockets, and still not clear, is whether the systems will be supplied with the US’s own thermobaric warheads. I assume they will, and thus, like it or not for the Biden administration, we’ll be climbing the escalation ladder unless we’re going to countenance a Ukrainian rout. (on Memorial Day itself, Monday, May 30th, there are NY Times accounts of President Zelensky visiting the troops at the Donbas front, a visit which reinforces the gravity of the situation I’ve highlighted in this posting.)
My conclusion at the end of this May, 2022 is this: for all the hoopla and self-congratulations U.S. officialdom is heaping on itself for “deterring Russia” and “defending Ukraine,” and re-vitalizing if not expanding NATO, (all of which contains some truth) it was the failure to expand NATO before the invasion to include Ukraine that was so damaging given the history of Ukraine’s previous approaches and the US’s greenlighting… And it was the failure to send selected Western nation troops to Ukraine before the Feb. 24th invasion (with or without NATO approval), and indeed, what is perhaps worse, the telegraphing of a clear private and then public signal that we would not do so, nor use Western air power to rebel the invasion – that has proven nearly catastrophic for Ukraine. What else did Putin need to see to flash “green light” in his calculations whether to invade or not.
Biden’s performance has been, then, an amazing and contradictory set of measures, too little and tool late to prevent, and perhaps now even to stop the Russian advances, shying away from – as “escalatory” – the very tools necessary to stop, then evict Russian forces and restore Ukrainian borders. Combined with this failure of tactical and strategic decisiveness comes the bizarre and ill-disciplined verbal personal level belligerence from the President – “brutal thug, war criminal, genocidal” hurled at Putin – as if we were committed to the full missing steps needed at the beginning to prevent the invasion, but now were determined to getting rid of Putin…by what means? (Apparently a military and economic war of attrition which never risks US/NATO lives). It’s been far too timid when bravery and risk taking were called for, in December-January of 2021-2022 if not earlier (going back to Putin’s essay in July of 2021) and over-the-top amateurish belligerence after, insuring that Putin would continue if not expand his brutal tactics and territorial goals.
All the worst publicly stated by Biden about Putin was true, very true, but no wartime leader should utter those characterizations unless they meant to go all the way home to victory, and Biden looks to me to be stranded far from military home…with the soldiers and citizens of Ukraine paying a price which will shock the West when finally tallied.
Part II: The U.S. on the verge… the exact shape and form of it unknowable for now….”No longer ‘Unthinkable,’ the odds for ‘The Next Civil War’ continue to grow.
I had intended to write about this enormous and fraught topic very early in 2022, but two things came to slow me down: the difficulty in coming to grips with Representative Jamie Raskin’s book “Unthinkable,” and its optimism about salvaging and restoring our constitutional republic, and the case laid out by Stephen Marche in his book “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future,” where the outcome is certain and grim, only the exact shape and timing for the American descent is uncertain. They represent in a pretty clear sense the two opposite psychological poles of the issue. They do agree however, that the “cult” of the Constitution formulated at the end of the 18th century and its structural progeny, especially the Electoral College and Senate, are ill suited to serve the march of modernity represented by modern globalized capitalism and the problems it spawns. The American Right would heartily (and more) disagree.
Editor’s Note: I was going to publish this second essay at the same time as the above post on the war on Ukraine, but I want to pay due tribute to the seriousness and difficulty of this topic, so I will do so after some more work. To say the least about it.
gracchibros 