Can ANYone Explain Why We Are in Ukraine? Or How We Plan to Get Out? (Echoes of Afghanistan?)
Anyone? Anyone?
I’m so old I remember a time in my own lifetime when 80 BILLION Dollars was considered a lot of money. To prove I continue in my antediluvian way of thinking, I still think it’s a lot of money, especially when there seems to be no one who can tell us the why or the how, including the woke Generals who are paid handsomely to provide us — remember “We The People”? How quaint!— those answers.
My questions this morning are prompted by two excellent pieces of commentary by two very astute observers of the descent into madness which is the Ukraine-Russia conflict, insanity heightened to heretofore unimaginable levels due to the fact that one of the adversaries happens to hold the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
In his usual clear and incisive style, John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist sketches the outline of the problem facing Americans, and, pardon me for being so blunt about it, their money, as he opens his piece entitled U.S. Taxpayers Have Bought a Bloody Stalemate in Ukraine:
The trove of recently leaked intelligence documents related to the Ukraine war should prompt Americans to start asking tough questions about our involvement in that conflict, which one of the documents, a Feb. 23 overview of fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region, describes as a “grinding campaign of attrition” that has reached a “stalemate.”
U.S. taxpayers have poured nearly $80 billion into this war over the past 14 months. At what point are we allowed to ask whether a “stalemate” in a “grinding campaign of attrition” is a good deal for Americans?
Above all, Americans should demand the bipartisan Washington consensus that supports indefinitely funding the war explain what our strategy is, define what the American interest is in it, and detail how they plan to achieve something beyond an interminable war of attrition that risks pulling us into direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. At the very least, the American people deserve more than inane platitudes from Antony Blinken about “Ukrainian victory” and “standing united with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” as if total Russian defeat and withdrawal is a realistic outcome.
Inane, indeed. A word which so perfectly describes the swarm of incompetents who are our national “leaders” today under the most incompetent President in American history. A good example was the recent statement by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (how it pains me to have to type those words), who, of course, is a universally recognized expert on warfare, that “we” (translation: our money) will stay in Ukraine “as long as it takes.” Does ANYone, including most specifically the robot who spoke those words, have ANY idea what that means? Do you?
If so, and I ask this as genuinely as I know how to put it, please share it with us as many of us lowly citizens whose money is funding this dystopian nightmare are well and truly searching for answers.
The Davidson piece, and I cannot recommend too highly a reading of the entire piece, continues, addressing the 800 pound gorilla in the room which no one seems to want to even acknowledge:
One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.
What is the plan if (and really, when) Beijing decides to invade Taiwan? No one seems to have an answer — or even seems willing to acknowledge there’s a problem. Nor do our political leaders have an answer to the increasingly obvious reality that U.S. sponsorship of Ukraine is pushing Moscow into Beijing’s arms and helping to accelerate a China-led coalition to challenge the U.S. dollar reserve currency status and usher in a truly multi-polar world.
Read that second paragraph again and see if it doesn’t bring back a strong recollection of another bleak moment in the history of this old world. Does 1938-1939 Europe ring even a faint little bell?
Anyone? Anyone?
Just as no one seems to want to even mention the most dangerous threat facing America today, China, another article addresses the danger posed in another part of the world, in fact, a few feet from our own soverign soil, Mexico. Col. Douglas Macgreagor (Ret.), a former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration and a decorated combat veteran, speaks to this problem in a piece entitled Americans Must Choose. He opens with a discussion which includes words almost never heard in the bought-and-paid-for media of today: “Ukraine is losing the fight with Russia.”
Choosing war is the most important policy decision Washington makes on behalf of the American people. War profoundly affects the domestic economy, and the human carnage it creates is not limited to foreign soil. Yet, the last time American voters compelled a fundamental policy shift away from war was in 1968, when Nixon promised to end the Vietnam conflict and devise an honorable exit.
Once again, Americans must choose. Will Americans continue to support escalating proxy war in Ukraine, a byproduct of Washington’s pursuit of global hegemony? Or will Americans demand that Washington defend America’s borders, maintain a republic that upholds the rule of law, respect the cultures and traditions of nations different from us, and trade freely with all nations, even as it protects America’s economic prosperity, its commerce, and its citizens?
The American financial and economic system is at risk of failing catastrophically. And Ukraine is losing the fight with Russia. Unless Americans demand new directions in foreign policy now, as they did in 1968, they will surrender control over their lives and incomes to the Washington elite’s orgy of spending on a dangerous proxy war against Russia and the arbitrary exercise of state power against American citizens at home.
He then addresses that other verboten topic in a way which reveals the real hidden agenda behind the ranking of priorities in these scenarios: the profit motive of the War Machine and the massive donor base it represents:
In a report called “Joint Operating Environment 2008,” the authors warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.” The report did not command the attention of the Obama administration and Washington’s current political elites seem no more interested today than they were in 2009.
Against this backdrop of social, political, and economic decay, the president and Congress are effectively ignoring the disintegration of civil society in Mexico. Mexican drug cartels (with the assistance of enablers in Cuba and Venezuela) are not only invading America with impunity. The cartels are also exposing Americans to criminal violence in their own country.
Yet it is not the metastasizing cancer of criminality on the Rio Grande that is the strategic focus for President Biden and his compliant congress. It is the proxy war in Ukraine.
When it comes to defense spending and donor money, Mexico cannot compete with Russia or China. Washington takes it as a matter of faith that a divided Ukraine on the model of a divided Germany will support a new Cold War with Moscow for decades. Adding China to the new “axis of evil” is simply icing on the cake for defense hawks and their donors.
Is Washington serious? Or is the new, budding Cold War paradigm simply a clever way to guarantee a steady stream of funding for Defense and lucrative donations for the Hill? Are the new threats abroad also designed to silence dissident voices at home and command domestic obedience from the American People? These are fair questions.
The conclusions of these two pieces bear repeating as they sum up so perfectly the perfidy and incompetence and sheer madness of the decisions being made by those put in power at least in part by, as Teddy Roosevelt termed them, “those timid souls” who were “frightened” by mean tweets.
Davidson concludes:
From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.
The only real question, at this point, is how many more tens of billions will American taxpayers have to spend to find out how this ends?
Col. Macgreagor, quoting former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, perfectly describes our frighteningly impaired “Commander-in-Chief” in concluding:
To paraphrase former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, any American president or politician who is willing to risk a high-end conventional land war with Russia should have his head examined, or at a minimum, deserves serious psychiatric care. The same must be said of anyone in Washington who wants to engage in nuclear brinksmanship with Moscow.
It is time to choose again. What kind of Republic do Americans want? What kind of foreign policy do Americans want?
“A Time For Choosing.” Just writing those words brought up a sense of loss so forlorn and sad that we have no one in sight like the one many of us refer to as The Last Real President, President Ronald W. Reagan and his magnificfent 1964 speech of the same name. What better way to close this discussion of the inane “leaders” of our time than to remember the one who was the walking, living personification of the word “leadership”, President Reagan:
We quite simply cannot lose hope as the day we do that we lose the greatest experiment in self-governance ever devised by the mind of man. 2024 will truly be the most important election in any of our lifetimes.
God Bless America!