Tag Archives: #Ukraine

Posted on by

They all looked scared

I wish I could more fully remember the scene from the movie The Right Stuff in which Scott Glenn, playing Alan Shepard is describing some people and says, in a normal tone of voice, “they all look” and then changes his tone to a sinister “scared.” Why? Because all of a sudden the people who have been pushing more and more support for Ukraine just started defecating in their pants. From The Wall Street Journal:

Missile Blast in Poland Risked Russia-NATO Clash Before Both Sides Dialed Back

Ukraine air-defense likely fired the missile, officials said, and responses from Biden and the Kremlin showed a shared wish to avoid escalation

By Daniel Michaels, Laurence Norman and Drew Hinshaw | Wednesday, Nov 16, 2022 | 12:54 PM EST

BRUSSELS—The explosion of a stray air-defense missile in Poland on Tuesday offers an unsettling reminder of how close Russia’s war in Ukraine is to NATO territory, and with that the risk of confrontation between nuclear powers.

But fast efforts by both sides to ease rising tensions indicate that despite the conflict’s brutality and mounting toll, neither Russia nor NATO countries want fighting to spill west of Ukraine.

The first sign of efforts to prevent escalation came hours after the missile crashed in Poland and killed two people, when President Biden said that preliminary information indicated that the missile strike was unlikely to have been fired from Russia and pledged to investigate the incident.

Hours later, top officials from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the missile was likely a Soviet-made weapon fired by a Ukrainian air-defense system, and that there was no evidence it was directed there intentionally.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

And now we’ve seen that first military “accident” from the Russo-Ukrainian War spill into a NATO country, and the policy-makers are all looking scared. They should look scared. They should look scared fecesless.

Further down:

(NATO Secretary-General Jens) Stoltenberg — a relentless critic of Russian aggression — sought to stress that events never got out of hand.

“NATO is prepared for situations like this,” he said, first by trying to prevent them, and if that fails, by working “to ensure they don’t spiral out of control.”

Russia also demonstrated a desire to contain the incident. Its Defense Ministry said Wednesday that precision strikes were carried out on targets only on Ukrainian territory and no closer than about 20 miles from the Ukraine-Poland border.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday offered some rare praise for the U.S. — while criticizing some Europeans — in his comments welcoming what he described as the “restrained and much more professional reaction of the American side and the American president” to the news.

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Peskov dismissed European and Ukrainian comments Tuesday blaming Russia as “another hysterical and frenzied Russophobic reaction,” which he said wasn’t based on any solid data.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Twitter on Wednesday that Kyiv was ready to participate in a joint investigation into the incident and requested immediate access to the site.

NATO ambassadors on Wednesday held an emergency meeting in Brussels to discuss the missile incident and to coordinate the alliance’s next moves. The incident also dominated a meeting of European Union ambassadors, who unanimously agreed “that Russia bears direct responsibility for yesterday’s tragedy, for the death of two Polish citizens,” said Poland’s ambassador to the European Union, Andrzej Sadoś.

The “alliance’s next moves” need to be to resist the pressure to increase military and economic aid to Ukraine. We’re going to see that pressure coming, from those who are stuck in World War II conventional thinking, to resist Russia more strongly, forgetting that the lessons of a war which ended 77 years ago among parties which were still limited in what they could do militarily by weaponry and geography might not be all that applicable to a situation in which Russia has the capability to rain down nuclear fire on every NATO country in 30 minutes after taking a decision to do so.

It’s no fun, no fun at all, to think that Russia could just start a war like this, could get away with killing thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians, could get away with devastating that benighted country, but at some point people have to consider that all of the rules and old ideas have changed with the development of strategic nuclear arsenals.

Posted on by

How can the American left so blithely want to increase the chances of a nuclear war?

The argument is always the same: “if we don’t do this now, it will harm American security in the future.” If only people realized that what we are doing now is already harming American security! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Trudy Rubin, from her Twitter biography.

If they win, MAGA Republicans will push to abandon Ukraine and harm U.S. security.

GOP candidates, along with Musk and Trump, echo Kremlin talking points in pushing to end Ukraine aid and force Kyiv to negotiate with genocidal Putin

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, November 6, 2022

The ad during the first World Series game between the Phillies and the Houston Astros was terrifying — and totally misleading.

It denounced Joe Biden for sending billions in aid and weapons to Ukraine while U.S. cities were awash in crime and undocumented immigrants. “Joe Biden says his fight in Ukraine could lead to nuclear Armageddon. World War III,” the ad’s narrator intoned. “I say no mas.”

Trudy Rubin is a long-time columnist for the Inquirer, and a member of the newspaper’s Editorial Board. Someone so intimately familiar with the City of Brotherly Love cannot be unaware that her home city actually is “awash in crime and undocumented immigrants”. As her own newspaper reported, there was another mass shooting in the Kensington neighborhood, which the Inky recently described as “a section of Philadelphia beset by an open-air drug market and higher concentrations of poverty and addiction” and saying “no neighborhood has been as burdened by shootings.” With 445 homicides and a total of 2004 shooting victims as of Monday, October 31st, it would certainly seem to me that Philly is “awash in crime”.

Does Miss Rubin dispute that President Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress have sent billions of dollars in aid and equipment to Ukraine? Does she deny that President Biden and his Administration have talked about “World War III” and nuclear war? One wouldn’t think she would, considering that she linked the Washington Post article documenting it!

More than 1.1 million viewers “liked” the ad when it surfaced on Twitter.

Well, Heaven forfend! 1.1 million people are opposed to increasing the probability of nuclear war? A scandal, I say, a scandal!

The ad’s sponsor was a virulently anti-immigrant, dark money group called Citizens for Sanity, which is linked to Steven Miller, former President Donald Trump’s close White House aide and anti-immigration tsar. Yet the attack on U.S. aid to Ukraine — in language that could have been taken from the Kremlin’s own playbook — was especially disturbing.

While there’s a lot more in Miss Rubin’s column, this is the money line: being opposed to American aid to one side in a conflict where the other side has a strategic nuclear arsenal capable of incinerating every large American city is “especially disturbing.”

This has, of course, been much of the Democrats’ and the neoconservatives’ playbook: if you are opposed to a policy which increases the probability of nuclear war, why you must be pro-Russia and Vladimir Putin’s stooge! Apparently, the seemingly unusual notion that some people might not like the idea of increasing the probability of nuclear war without supporting or being sympathetic to Russia just never enters their minds, or at least will not until after the election!

The advertisement is a preview of what to expect if Tuesday’s elections return a MAGA-heavy GOP majority to the House of Representatives, let alone the Senate. And it is a gift to Vladimir Putin, who hopes his battlefield losses in Ukraine will be offset by MAGA victories in the U.S.A.

The Inquirer is, as you might have guessed, wholly in the bag for the Democrats, and the Editorial Board absotively, posilutely hate Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” Republicans. Much of the idea behind Miss Rubin’s column is an appeal to vote, if not for Democrats, against Republicans.

I do not know if the columnist has any control over where related article blurbs appear on the newspaper’s website, but the one pictured at the left showed up immediately below her last quoted paragraph, and it leads to another of Miss Rubin’s columns:

Putin’s nuclear threats and strikes on civilians rule out negotiations or an off-ramp

Biden should expedite arrival of air defenses for Ukraine and make clear to Putin that nuclear use would be catastrophic for Russia.

by Trudy Rubin | Thursday, October 13, 2022

On Tuesday morning, as news broke of Russia’s vicious missile strikes on civilian targets all across Ukraine, I texted a friend in the badly hit city of Kharkiv.

“We will not be intimidated,” Oleksiy quickly texted back. (I am using only his first name because he is now serving with the Ukrainian army.) “Kharkiv is ready for this.” He told me he was cooking borscht on a makeshift outdoor grill as we spoke because a barrage of Russian missiles had knocked out electricity in the city. The Russians had also targeted a children’s playground, civilian apartment blocks, and a downtown crossroads at morning rush hour.

That reminded me of a part of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, in which one of the characters in the novel mused how interesting it was that Nazi propaganda told people that Allied bombs missed military targets but fell unerringly on schools, churches, and hospitals.

A couple of paragraphs down, she continued:

Ukrainians believe they are in an existential struggle for the very survival of their homeland. They are willing to pay a very high price for victory. Now is not the time for cease-fires or negotiations, which would only give the Russians a breather to rally their flailing troops. . . . .

Ukrainians like Oleksiy say any peace talks are impossible until Russian forces are driven out of most or all of their country. What kind of negotiations can be held with a Russian leader who insists that the Ukrainian state has no right to exist because it is part of Russia? Putin insists that Russia will never return the roughly 20% of Ukraine that it has annexed via fake referendums — including the Black and Azov Sea coastal areas that are key to the Ukrainian economy.

What follows that is what the columnist wishes that President Biden would say, which is, in effect, unconditional surrender. No, she doesn’t use those two words, but the effect is the same. A face-saving way out for Russia or a negotiated cease-fire? Not in Miss Rubin’s world.

But the last time the words ‘unconditional surrender’ were used as national policy meant that the nations against which they were directed, Germany and Japan, had to be beaten into complete submission, bombed until Hell wouldn’t have any more, and thoroughly militarily defeated. Germany and Japan, however, did not have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them on their enemies’ home soil, and really, no way to attack the United States at all; Vladimir Putin has those things.

If there is to be no easy way out for Russia, and no negotiated cease-fire or settlement, that means the war in Ukraine must continue until one side or the other is militarily defeated. If that happens, there are only two options:

  1. Russia wins, in which case Ukraine not only loses its freedom and independence, but sees hundreds of thousands more of its civilians killed and much of its infrastructure and economy destroyed; or
  2. Ukraine wins, in which case a huge amount of Russia’s military equipment is lost, damaged, or destroyed, and many, many thousands of its soldiers killed, along with President Putin driven with his back against the wall, and little reason not to try to use tactical nuclear weapons against advancing Ukrainian troops and military bastions.

Even Miss Rubin noted that Mr Biden “warned recently that Putin’s nuclear threats raise ‘the prospect of Armageddon.'”

Such a casual remark, at a campaign fund-raiser, scares rather than educates, and conveys uncertainty to Putin.

Ma’am, it ought to scare people; the threat of nuclear war ought to scare everybody!

In Dr Strangelove, when Ambassador Alexei de Sadeskii reveals the existence of the ‘Doomsday Machine,’ President Merton Muffley asks him, “I’m afraid I don’t understand something, Alexei. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out this attack?”, at which point the Ambassador replies, “No, sir, it is not a thing a sane man would do.” It isn’t, but Miss Rubin, and President Biden, and the whole cavalcade of neocon warmongers are now somehow depending upon the sanity and Western logic that Mr Putin has yet to demonstrate that he has.

And if they’re wrong, if they manage to provide enough weapons and money and materiel for Ukraine to beat back the Russians, and Vladimir Vladimirovich does decide that ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons are the only way to reverse a military defeat, what happens then? Perhaps Miss Rubin isn’t worried about Citizens Bank Park and the Liberty Bell being incinerated in nuclear fire, but I am, and the escalation of the use of nuclear weapons, once that threshold is crossed, is something we can never know when it will stop.

Posted on by

The economy being an electoral loser for the Democrats, now they’re pushing Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine!

We have noted ‘neo-conservative’ Washington Post columnist Max Boot several times previously, not particularly charitably. The neo-conservatives were rather useful to Republicans from the Reagan Administration through that of the younger George Bush, in that they supported a stronger American military. The trouble is that while conservatives wanted the US to have the world’s strongest military to defend the United States, and were proceeding from something of a Cold War mindset, the neo-cons wanted to use that military to project American power forward. President Reagan used that power judiciously, in quick, easy actions in Panama and Grenada, and the elder President Bush used it in response to the actual threat of Iraq under Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, and the threat posed to world oil supplies. The younger President Bush used it in response to an actual threat in Afghanistan, and a perceived threat from Iraq. The actions of President Reagan and the elder President Bush went well: they had defined missions which could be, and were, accomplished quickly, and we got right back out. Under the younger President Bush? Not so much: the wholly necessary mission of destroying al Qaeda was accomplished fairly quickly, while the very much unnecessary mission of trying to build Iraq and Afghanistan into functioning, Western-style democracies took years and years and years, and, in the end were never accomplished.

But the neo-cons have learned nothing.

Max Boot, trying to look all journalist-like in his fedora. From his Twitter biography.

The midterms are a referendum on democracy in America and Ukraine

by Max Boot | Monday, October 24, 2022 | 1:11 PM EDT

Polls suggest that the economy and crime are among the most important issues for voters in the midterms — and that, as a result, Republicans are surging in the home stretch. I think a lot of voters are missing the point. These elections are actually a referendum on whether you favor the continuation of democracy in America — and Ukraine.

Can we please stop pretending that Ukraine was a democracy? In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych was elected President in what observers stated was a free and fair election. As President, Mt Yanukovych was more pro-Russian than oriented toward western Europe, and declined to sign a closer arrangement between the European Union and Ukraine, or accept NATO membership. He was not defeated for re-election, but overthrown by the “Euromaidan Revolution“. Some democratic forms were reinstated, but deposing President Yanukovych was most certainly not democratic at all.

Those issues are more closely linked than most people realize, because most of the same MAGA candidates who support Donald Trump’s strongman rule at home are either indifferent or hostile to the fate of democracy abroad. J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, exemplifies the trend: He has said the 2020 election was “stolen” and “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

That makes it all the more disturbing that Vance and other MAGA candidates are in the lead two weeks before Election Day. Vladimir Putin must have a smug smile on his face as he reads reports of recent political developments in the “Main Enemy,” as KGB agents of his generation referred to the United States.

A Post analysis found that “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 291 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.” Put another way, this means a majority of the most important GOP candidates reject the fundamental premise of democracy, which is to accept the outcome of an election even if your side loses. Yet in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll, 39 percent of voters (and 71 percent of Republicans) said they are open to supporting candidates who reject the results of the 2020 election. If these candidates prevail, it will mean that aspiring authoritarians could have a stranglehold on our democracy.

I must say that I find this amusing: the distinguished Mr Boot, who tells us how very much he supports democracy, also tells us that it is a horrible, horrible thing that the voters might have issues other than Donald Trump and the war in Ukraine on their minds, and that if Republican candidates win a majority in the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, in a free and fair election, our democracy is doomed.

The fallout could reach all the way to Ukraine, where an embattled democracy needs U.S. aid to beat back the Russian invasion. Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely next House speaker, said: “I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it.”

Mr Boot, it seems, is very concerned that if Republican candidates win majorities in Congress as the result of free elections, they might just follow what they see as the will of the voters, and stop sending unlimited and unaccountable aid to Ukraine. Don’t the public have the right to believe that we shouldn’t do that?

Mr Boot, who never served in the military himself, is very much a fan of war, and he wants to see American and European aid to Ukraine to continue, to fight Russia, a nation with a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal.

As we have previously noted, Mr Boot, who was brought to the United States as a child when his parents fled the Soviet Union, and other neoconservatives have not been real fans of individual liberty. Patterico’s tweet, “We may get to a point where the big debate becomes: why on earth didn’t we institute more coercive measures on the unvaccinated in July 2021, when we could have stopped COVID before it mutated beyond the vaccines’ capacity to immunize people against it?” wound up not aging well, as there were already breakthrough COVID infections among people who were immunized, and while the SARS-CoV-2 virus does seem to have mutated to be able to get beyond vaccinations to prevent contraction and transmission of the virus even more easily — it’s clear that, even originally, the vaccines didn’t completely prevent infection — it has also mutated to be a much less serious disease.

Mr Boot called President Trump a fascist, knowing that the definition of fascism includes ” individual interests (being) subordinated to the good of the nation,” as he called for individual interests being subordinated to the good of the nation![1]Via Wikipedia: “In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy in September 2017, Max Boot outlines his political views as follows: “I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion … Continue reading

Then again, why would we expect any sense, or trust the judgement, of a man who stated, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.” One would think that a man who holds a baccalaureate degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master of Arts degree in diplomatic history from Yale would know and understand that the Soviet concentration camp system flourished under Comrade Stalin; did Mr Boot believe that Donald Trump would somehow establish his own ГУЛаг, Гла́вное управле́ние лагере́й, in the United States? If he did, it certainly never happened, and the repression of speech in the United States has happened only by liberal institutions in banning conservatives, not the government under President Trump.

Sadly, it isn’t just Mr Boot; the Editorial Board of The Washington Post also weighed in, telling readers, “This is no time to go wobbly on resisting Russian aggression.” Worried sick that the voters might, gasp! vote in a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the Editorial Board tell us:

It’s no surprise that the Kremlin would try to divert attention from its failures in Ukraine toward a new story about Kyiv’s purported plans to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb.” Transparent disinformation, Moscow’s tale might be intended to serve as a pretext for its own first strike with unconventional weaponry. More likely, it is another attempt to play on the West’s fears of nuclear war, the goal of which, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that tracks the conflict, is “to slow or suspend Western military aid to Ukraine and possibly weaken the NATO alliance.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin guessed right that Western solidarity with Ukraine would be crucial; he has consistently guessed wrong about the willingness of Kyiv’s friends to stay the course, despite the costs of doing so. As Mr. Putin has no doubt noticed, however, there are incipient fissures in that united front, including — ominously — signs of a split within the Republican Party over U.S. aid to Ukraine, which has totaled $54 billion since the war began in February. Rank-and-file GOP voters, possibly influenced by messaging from former president Donald Trump and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, are warming to the idea that U.S. aid is a waste of money better spent on domestic problems. A September Pew Research poll found that a significant minority of Republicans — 32 percent — say the United States is providing “too much” aid, up from 9 percent in March. Small wonder 57 GOP members of the House and 11 GOP senators voted no on a $40 billion package in May. Trump-endorsed Republican candidates for Senate in Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio have disparaged aid for Ukraine, as have several House candidates. Republican Joe Kent, running for Congress in a historically red district in Washington state, has tweeted: “No aid to Ukraine unless they are at the [negotiating] table.”

If indeed the Republicans take one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, it will be up to their leadership to contain isolationist sentiment and work with President Biden and other Democrats on aid for Ukraine. Unfortunately, potential speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week that next year “people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.” Mr. McCarthy — who voted for the May bill — modified that remark slightly later, noting that he supports “making sure that we move forward to defeat Russia.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell countered Mr. McCarthy by calling for “expedited” aid. To his credit, Mr. McConnell has been a strong supporter of a robust U.S. response to Russian aggression in Europe, based on the succinct, and apt, rationale that it is an investment in vital U.S. interests: “The future of America’s security and core strategic interests will be shaped by the outcome of this fight. Anyone concerned about the cost of supporting a Ukrainian victory should consider the much larger cost should Ukraine lose.”

Good heavens, it looks like the Editorial Board have gone full neo-con! The concept that intervention is required to support “vital US interests” could have been lifted from the writings of Bill Kristol.

To be sure, real democracies abroad are in American interests, because real democracies are (mostly) unlikely to start wars of aggression. But there is a real, qualitative difference between wars of aggression when Iraq invaded Kuwait, or the Muslim guerrilla wars in Africa, and the invasion of Ukraine by a nation with a nuclear arsenal capable of killing the majority of people on earth. I do not want Russia to succeed in its war of conquest against Ukraine, but I want the defense of Ukraine to turn into a nuclear war even less.

That’s the part these clowns just don’t get: the harder we press Russia, the harder Russia as resisted. The action by OPEC+ to cut back oil production, to push increased prices, was led in part by Russia, anxious to hurt the United States and NATO Europe for giving aid to Ukraine. The cutbacks of natural gas shipments to Europe, as winter is approaching — and remember: most of Germany and Poland, and a good part of France, are north of our longest border with Canada — are methods Russia is taking against the West that is supporting Ukraine. If, after all of that, Ukraine begins to push back Russian troops, it is hardly out of the possibility that Russia would use smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons against Ukrainian troop concentrations. Vladimir Putin does not seem to be the most stable national leader around, and he certainly doesn’t think like a Westerner; he could easily see this as a logical step to cow the West into ceasing its aid to Ukraine, and a way to stave off defeat.

Once that nuclear threshold has been crossed, we have no idea whatsoever how far and how often it will be crossed. I do care what happens in Ukraine . . . but I care more about what happens in New York and Philadelphia and Lexington, and one thing about which I care is not increasing the chances that one of them could be incinerated in nuclear fire.

The GOP’s mixed signals are music to Mr. Putin’s ears. Also unhelpful, in its own way, was Monday’s letter from a group of 30 progressive House Democrats to Mr. Biden, urging the president to open direct cease-fire negotiations with Moscow. The Democrats, unlike Mr. Biden’s critics in the GOP, said they want to “pair” this new diplomatic push with continued aid; there is no moral equivalence between the two parties in that regard. Still, Russia is all too likely to advertise the progressives’ letter, which includes the suggestion that ending the war would help ease high gas prices, as evidence of flagging U.S. resolve. The White House politely but firmly rebuffed the idea, as it should have. This is no time to go wobbly — and that goes for lawmakers in both parties.

And now we have The Washington Post’s Editorial Board telling us that not only should the United States continue sending military aid to Ukraine, but that we shouldn’t even attempt to negotiate an end to the war.

If there is no negotiated end to the war — something which would decrease the chances of a nuclear escalation and the spread of a nuclear conflict — then the war must be fought to a conclusion, with one side winning and the other side losing. If Ukraine loses, it’s independence is gone and the Ukrainian people will suffer a lot more death and devastation; if Russia loses, the probabilities of nuclear war significantly increase. I, for one, don’t see what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies,” as a wise idea.

There is, of course, the unstated part of both Mr Boot’s and the Editorial Board’s messages: with the domestic issues of inflation and the American people getting poorer, in real terms, those evil reich-wing Republicans might just gain more power, including taking control of the House of Representatives, and even the Senate, which would completely mess with the left’s domestic goals of nationalizing an abortion license, expanding homosexual and transgender ‘rights,’ putting Donald Trump in jail, and generally pushing the ‘progressive’ agenda. In the end, those things are far more important to them than Ukraine, but those have not been the electoral winners they think they should be.

References

References
↑1 Via Wikipedia: “In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy in September 2017, Max Boot outlines his political views as follows: “I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-immigration. I am fiscally conservative: I think we need to reduce the deficit and get entitlement spending under control. I am pro-environment: I think that climate change is a major threat that we need to address. I am pro-free trade: I think we should be concluding new trade treaties rather than pulling out of old ones. I am strong on defense: I think we need to beef up our military to cope with multiple enemies. And I am very much in favor of America acting as a world leader: I believe it is in our own self-interest to promote and defend freedom and free markets as we have been doing in one form or another since at least 1898.

In December 2017, also in Foreign Policy, Boot wrote that recent events—particularly since the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president—had caused him to rethink some of his previous views concerning the existence of white privilege and male privilege. “In the last few years, in particular, it has become impossible for me to deny the reality of discrimination, harassment, even violence that people of color and women continue to experience in modern-day America from a power structure that remains for the most part in the hands of straight, white males. People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefited from my skin color and my gender — and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.”

Does that sound like a conservative to you?
Posted on by

The West are about out of non-military actions to take against Russia Economic sanctions are hurting democracies as much as Russia

The recent Supreme Court decisions in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization have pushed almost all discussion of other issues off the front pages, but there is still that nasty little war going on in Ukraine. I have made my position clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was very wrong, and almost everyone wants to see Ukraine win against the Russians. But I, at least, do not think it is worth risking what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.”

President Joe Biden and the leaders of the NATO nations have all said that Russia’s invasion is wrong, wrong, wrong, and that something ought to be done, but reality has a way of biting people in the gluteus maximus, and as the G-7 leaders meet in Berlin to decide just what to do, that reality is staring them dead in the eye. From The Wall Street Journal:

G-7 Summit Exposes West’s Challenges in Tackling Russia

Economic fallout is hampering further sanctions against Moscow as Ukraine demands more weapons to halt the Russian advance

By Bojan Pancevski | Tuesday, June 28, 2022 | 9:31 AM EDT

The original picture caption is: “G-7 leaders displayed some unity during their summit as they pledged their unwavering support to Ukraine.
Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.” Click to enlarge.

BERLIN—The Group of Seven rich democracies ended their summit with an agreement to discuss a batch of new sanctions against Russia, but the gathering underlined the limits of using economic tools to punish Russia four months after its invasion of Ukraine.

While weapons deliveries have made an immediate difference on the battlefield and Ukraine has been clamoring for more equipment to repel Moscow’s forces, sanctions have proven slow to take effect, some of them have backfired against the West, and new ones have so far been too complex to deploy quickly.

G-7 leaders displayed some unity during their three-day summit in the German Alps as they pledged their unwavering support to Ukraine, with no sign of dissent on public display. Yet Kyiv and some Western experts said the Russian advance could only be halted in the short term with more heavy weapons.

The unprecedented sanctions against Russia implemented by the G-7 and other nations—targeting Moscow’s economy, energy exports and central-bank reserves—have caused global market volatility and raised energy costs.

Now high inflation, slowing growth, and the specter of energy shortages in Europe this winter are damping the West’s appetite for tougher sanctions against Moscow.

The photo caption originally said that the G-7 leaders “pledged their unwavering support to Ukraine,” but, of course, that support is wavering, because the sanctions imposed so far are hurting their own people. The only thing I see in the photo is further evidence that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson still doesn’t know how to brush his hair. Continue reading →

Posted on by

Max Boot, the neo-conservatives, and endless war

Max (Maxim?) Aleksandrovich Boot was born on September 12, 1969 in Moscow, the son of two Russian Jews. They were lucky: they were able to emigrate to the United States in 1976, bringing young Max with them. Mr Boot, whose parents fled a strongly antisemitic regime in the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev, once said, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” even though the USSR under Comrade Staling might well have sent Mr Boot and his family to a concentration camp; the Soviet leaders really didn’t like Jews very much.

In other words, Mr Boot has all of the intuitive judgement of a mud clod.

We have previously noted how Mr Boot specifically, and many of the neo-conservative in general, don’t think much of our individual liberties, or certainly didn’t when it came to mandating vaccinations against COVID-19. Mr Boot, who dearly loves having American troops all over the globe and has been a student of military history and strategic studies but has never served in the military himself, fretted that it would be a disaster for the United States to pull out of Afghanistan, though what more could be accomplished in that fetid and festering sewer that we hadn’t been able to accomplish in the 19½ years we had already been there he could not articulate.

And here he goes again!

We can’t let Ukraine lose. It needs a lot more aid, starting with artillery.

by Max Boot | Monday, June 13, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT[1]If you are stymied by The Washington Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing here, for free.

Max boot, trying to look all journalist-like in his fedora. From his Twitter biography.

The battle of Donbas — with momentous implications for the future of Ukraine and the entire postwar world — is poised on a knife edge.

The Ukrainians are resisting bravely, but they are suffering terrible casualties and slowly losing ground. They are able to fire only 5,000 to 6,000 artillery rounds a day, compared with 50,000 rounds a day from the Russians. The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition for their old Soviet artillery, and they don’t have enough Western artillery tubes to make up for the shortfall.

I am reminded of the old poem about how “for want of a nail a shoe was lost,” then a horse, then a rider, then a battle, then a kingdom. We cannot afford to see Donbas lost for want of artillery shells.

If Russian dictator Vladimir Putin captures this region, after having already secured a land corridor from Crimea to the Russian border, he will hold roughly a fourth of Ukraine, including its industrial heartland and most of its Black Sea coast. The Ukrainian economy is already in dire shape (estimated to shrink by 45 percent this year). Putin will then be in a position to further squeeze the rump state, while preparing a final offensive to finish it off.

Even a limited Russian victory will send a dangerous signal to the world that the West is weak and aggression pays. We must send lots more aid to Ukraine now to avert the loss of Donbas and to enable a counteroffensive to retake ground already occupied, but not yet fortified, by the invaders.

Emphasis in the original.

The most obvious Ukrainian need is for more artillery tubes and shells. The Biden administration has already provided 108 M777 155mm howitzers and more than 220,000 artillery rounds. More recently, it promised to send four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) and ammunition with a maximum range of roughly 45 miles. That is wholly insufficient; even the 220,000 rounds would not last five days at current rates of use.

Huh? If, as Mr Boot stated just a couple of paragraphs previously, that the Ukrainians are able to fire only 5.000 to 6,000 artillery rounds per day, 220,000 rounds would last a whole lot longer than 4½ days. He’s actually talking about the Russians’ rate of fire, not the Ukrainians’.

The West should be sending hundreds of howitzers and multi-launch rocket systems, thousands of rockets and hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds. This should include Excalibur GPS-guided rounds for the M177 (range: 24 miles) and Army Tactical Missile Systems for the Himars (range: 186 miles). Those longer-range munitions would enable the Ukrainians to target Russia’s artillery, rockets and supply lines without risking their new weapons close to the front lines. Of course, it will take time to train Ukrainians on these systems, but they have shown they are fast learners.

That, of course, is not all Mr Boot wants to send to Ukraine to fight the Russians: he also called for sending  MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, F-16 fighter jets, A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft and Patriot air-defense systems.

An obvious question: if “we can’t let Ukraine lose,” as he claims in the column title, what does he want to do if Ukraine is about to lose even after such arms are sent to them?

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

In 1939, President Roosevelt started sending military equipment to the United Kingdom, covertly at first, then more openly, to hold off the Third Reich. Following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, we started sending military aid to the USSR as well. There were worries that Adolf Hitler would see this as the United States being at war with Germany, and it was bandied about that that was exactly what the President wanted, for Germany to declare war on the United States. After all, we had 3,600 miles of deep, blue water between the United States and German-occupied France, so there was really nothing Der Führer could do to us!

But if we start sending more and more supplies and weapons to Ukraine, we will be putting American troops and contractors on the ground in Poland . . . and Russia has the weaponry to strike Poland. Perhaps Mr Boot thinks that Vladimir Putin would never dare to strike an American installation, especially one on the soil of a NATO member nation, and I will admit that it would seem to be a stupid, stupid move. But we need to remember: Mr Putin is perfectly capable of stupid moves!

Yes, I have a vested interest in this: my older daughter is, as I type, preparing for a year-long deployment to Kuwait with the Army Corps of Engineers. While it seems unlikely, increased American presence in Poland, to ship more weapons to Ukraine, could very well result in a change of orders; the first people needed for an American installation in Poland would be the Corps of Engineers, and surveyors, and my daughter is a surveyor!

Russia has thousands of battlefield range and short range nuclear weapons. Just how would the United States, and NATO, respond if, feeling his back against the wall, Mr Putin used one, just one, lower-yield nuke against a shipping point for American and NATO weapons to Ukraine? He might well believe that such a tactic would so scare the US and NATO about a potential all-out nuclear war that we’d just stop and back off.

And, quite frankly, that should be the response. Ukraine is not worth a nuclear war!

Mr Boot and the neoconservatives have spent a lot of time and ink and bandwidth arguing for an aggressive, muscular, and interventionist American foreign policy, with the second Persian Gulf War against Iraq being the most obvious example. The first was started by Saddam Hussein, and if the ender President Bush had not been so eager to limit that war, and just gone a couple of days more, we could have eliminated Saddam Hussein in 1991. Because we didn’t do that, his son got in his head to rectify that, and we had the debacle of the second Iraqi war, which did topple President Hussein, but Iraq today is hardly a democratic paradise. We went into Afghanistan because we had to, to respond to al Qaeda’s attack on the United States, but we stayed and stayed and stayed, far beyond the mission to destroy al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden, stayed 10½ years after Mr bin Laden was sent to his eternal reward, and what was accomplished? Afghanistan is once again ruled by the Taliban, who have been reimposing the same policies that they had during their first reign.[2]Full disclosure: on my daughter’s previous deployment to Kuwait, she wound up in Afghanistan, though she was apparently in little danger.

I get it: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was very wrong, and almost everyone wants to see Ukraine win against the Russians. But I, at least, do not think it is worth risking what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.” The neo-cons, most of whom never spent a day in uniform, seem to have a romantic vision of the combat which they’ve only seen in the movies. If Mr Boot wants to see more American and NATO equipment sent to Ukraine to fight the Russians, then he needs to be on one of those convoys, in uniform, carrying an M4 rifle, and ready to fight himself. After all, he did note that there are “foreign volunteers” fighting with Ukraine’s ground forces. He needs to sign up himself.

References

References
↑1 If you are stymied by The Washington Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing here, for free.
↑2 Full disclosure: on my daughter’s previous deployment to Kuwait, she wound up in Afghanistan, though she was apparently in little danger.
Posted on by

Sanctions against Russia go up in gas

It seems that the Europeans, who are angry, angry, angry! at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin aren’t angry enough to do without Russian natural gas. From The Washington Post:

Europe accepts Putin’s demands on gas payments to avoid more shut-offs

By Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli | Tuesday, May 24, 2022 | 1:22 PM EDT

ROME — European energy companies appear to have bent to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that they purchase natural gas using an elaborate new payment system, a concession that avoids more gas shut-offs and also gives Putin a public relations victory while continuing to fund his war effort in Ukraine.

The system, which involves the creation of two accounts at Gazprombank, enables Europe to say it is technically paying for natural gas in euros, while Russia can say it is receiving payment in rubles — a requirement Putin imposed on “unfriendly” nations.

Putin’s insistence on rubles may be more about forcing European countries to scramble at his behest than about shoring up his country’s currency, some economists and energy experts suspect. European Union countries have been touchy about the notion they might violate their sanctions on Russia, and questions about the arrangement tested European unity, leading to weeks of chaos and contradictory guidance from Brussels. It also got countries talking about how much they still need Russian gas, even as they debate a Russian oil embargo.

Well, of course they need Russian gas! And they’ll continue to need Russian gas, especially as worsening economic conditions force reductions in investments on alternative energy sources. In the end, Mr Putin has them in a place in which their hearts and minds will follow.

But that also means sending money to Russia even as they condemn the Kremlin-launched war, sanction oligarchs and supply weapons to Ukraine.

Russia had already used strict capital controls and a massive interest rate hike to stabilize the ruble. With Europe now signaling that it will use the payment system as bills come due this week, the currency is strengthening all the more.

The system set up is a face-saving one, but it really doesn’t save a lot of face, not to anyone who has even a remote understanding of what is being done. The Europeans will pay their bills in euros, not the rubles President Putin had demanded, and then a special account at Газпромбанк will take the euros and convert them to rubles.

On February 24, 2022, the White House announced severe sanctions against Russian banks:

Today, the United States, along with Allies and partners, is imposing severe and immediate economic costs on Russia in response to Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine. Today’s actions include sweeping financial sanctions and stringent export controls that will have profound impact on Russia’s economy, financial system, and access to cutting-edge technology. The sanctions measures impose severe costs on Russia’s largest financial institutions and will further isolate Russia from the global financial system. With today’s financial sanctions, we have now targeted all ten of Russia’s largest financial institutions, including the imposition of full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions, and debt and equity restrictions, on institutions holding nearly 80% of Russian banking sector assets. The unprecedented export control measures will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, restricting Russia’s access to vital technological inputs, atrophying its industrial base, and undercutting Russia’s strategic ambitions to exert influence on the world stage. The impact of these measures will be significantly magnified due to historical multilateral cooperation with a wide range of Allies and partners who are mirroring our actions, inhibiting Putin’s ambition to diversify Russia’s brittle, one-dimensional economy. The scale of Putin’s aggression and the threat it poses to the international order require a resolute response, and we will continue imposing severe costs if he does not change course.

It appears, however, that “full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions” are somehow less important when it comes to Europe’s need for natural gas!

Posted on by

Mitt’s madness

Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, after having said that Russia was (then) the biggest geopolitical threat facing the United States, then-President Barack Hussein Obama, in their third presidential debate, hit back:

A few months ago, when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al Qaeda. You said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.

I’ve got to admit it: that was a great political quip!

Now, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — along with the invasion of the eastern portion of Ukraine in 2014 — the media are starting to acknowledge that Mr Romney was right.

The problem is that while Mr Romney was right, so was Mr Obama, about 1980s foreign policy, which the now Senator from Utah seems to still embrace: Continue reading →

Posted on by

The war mongers keep beating the drums Do you want to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia?

I get it: almost everyone wants to help Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. Helping Ukraine is good and noble, and something people just want to do. But there are some good and noble things which might not be all that wise.

My good friend, and contributor to this poor site on days when I cannot, William Teach, noted that there are some people who want the United States to get much, much more involved in the war in Ukraine:

Good Grief, Now They’re Advocating Giving Ukraine Three Squadrons Of A-10s

By William Teach March 4, 2022 – 6:45 am

There have been lots of memes about the coming WWIII. We’ve had people, such as Excitable Adam Kinzinger, push for a no fly zone. I certainly agree with Vox that it would be a monumentally bad idea. Thankfully, NATO and Let’s Go Brandon agree. Sending all those troops over to Europe isn’t the brightest idea. What are a few thousand going to do, when the U.S. already has over 50k in the European theater? Here’s another staggeringly foolish idea:

Transfer three A-10 aircraft squadrons to Ukraine now

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,“ spoke U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill in February 1941. Following this powerful speech, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed and Congress approved the lend-lease program. This provided the U.K. equipment and access to United States production capacity. This action was essential to stopping the Nazi advances.

Zelenskyy has been asking for planes. So far, NATO nations have said “nope.”

Sanctions must be accompanied by military success.

Zelenskyy has requested weapons and support in line with Churchill’s philosophy. Ukrainian soldiers have proved their courage and bravery. There is one more step that could be decisive: the transfer of three squadrons of A-10 aircraft to the Ukrainian Air Force.

This aircraft and its gun system were designed to counter an armored assault in Europe. They proved effective in Desert Storm’s target-rich environment, quite similar to the current advancing Russian force. They also became the infantry’s friend in close-air support missions.

The United States Air Force has deployment packages ready to go. The whole transfer to the Ukrainian Air Force could be completed in days after congressional authorization.

If you want to start WWIII, this would be a good way to do so. How do you get the planes there? Who flies them in? How does Russia react when A10’s which were the property of the United States just days before start blowing up Russian military equipment and troops? Furthermore, who will fly the planes? American pilots? WWIII. Ukrainian pilots? Are any trained on them? They aren’t bicycles. What about all the armaments? Shooting American made depleted uranium slugs would be WWIII.

Mr Teach then cited Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) and his tweeted series as to why he has not supported the resolutions moving through the House to support Ukraine.

Mr Massie’s twitter thread is seven tweets long:

  • (2 of 7)The resolution contains an open ended call for additional and immediate “defensive security assistance.” This term is so broad that it could include American boots on the ground or, as some of my colleagues have already requested, US enforcement of a no-fly zone.
  • (3/7) It expands the geographic scope of the US commitment to the conflict in Ukraine by condemning the country of Belarus. We should not be seeking to name new enemies or committing to overturning other governments.
  • (4/7) It calls for “fully isolating” Russia economically. This would hurt low-income US citizens who are already reeling from inflation. Innocent people in Russia, many of whom oppose Putin’s aggression, would suffer under crippling sanctions, possibly turning them against us.
  • (5/7) Crippling sanctions could also drive Putin to become more desperate, inciting him to resort to drastic measures such as escalating the weapons employed or the people targeted.
  • (6/7) The resolution contains a gratuitous statement that Ukraine and NATO will determine the relationship between the two of them. Of course this is true, but why should Congress assert this now when the goal is to de-escalate the conflict?
  • (7/7) It calls for continuing support “as long as the Russian Federation continues to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.” Depending on the definition of “violate,” this could be a US commitment to forever be actively engaged in a conflict with another nuclear country.

Mr Massie is, alas! not my district’s representative — I live in the 6th District — but he’s one of the best men in Congress. He understands that, emotion aside, starting a war with nuclear-armed Russia isn’t exactly the brightest idea in the world.[1]Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already … Continue reading

As World War II raged in Europe, but before we entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States engaged in some pretty blatant war moves against the Third Reich, sending war materiel to His Majesty’s Government, and later, even to Comrade Stalin’s. Our neutrality was hardly neutral!

It didn’t matter: there was nothing der Führer could do about it. His U-boats went after the convoys, and sent a lot of American Lend-lease largesse to the bottom of the Atlantic. President Roosevelt began “neutrality patrols” to convoy the cargo ships as far as Iceland, and for a while, Germany was deterred from attacking US Navy ships.

Following Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan . . . but not on Germany. Adolf Hitler, in yet another moment of his madness, decided that, on December 11, 1941, Germany would declare war on the United States, a colossal mistake, at a time in which the US, then at war only with Japan, could have concentrated our might in the Pacific.

But, just as the United Kingdom and France, despite their guarantees, could do nothing to help Poland, Germany could do nothing to strike at the United States. When Prime Minister Churchill said, “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,” he was speaking to a nation untouched, and untouchable, by war, a nation which risked little by ramping up its factories to build tanks and airplanes and rifles.

That isn’t the situation today. Unlike 1939, unlike 1941, the enemy can strike us, can literally kill hundreds of millions of Americans in less than an hour, can destroy every one of our major cities and irradiate our rural areas with a deadly fallout. Yes, that would mean that Russia was destroyed in turn, as the US could and almost certainly would launch an equally devastating nuclear response against the Soviet Union Russia, meaning that Russia would not somehow ‘win’ the nuclear war, but we would just as certainly lose. It would seem most probable that President Putin wouldn’t be insane enough to order a nuclear strike, but, then again, it would seem most probable that he wouldn’t have his troops fire on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, but that’s exactly what happened. It wound up being a bold and successful move, because after Russian artillery started fires at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians rushed to put out the fires, and Russian troops then occupied the plant, but it was a plan that could easily have gone very, very wrong. Counting on the former подполковник in the Комитет государственной безопасности to see things the way Westerners do is not a particularly wise strategy. What a man with a strategic nuclear arsenal, if pushed to the brink of military defeat in Ukraine, might do is something which ought to worry us.

Wanting to do more, wanting to do what we can to help Ukraine is not the same thing as wanting to help the United Kingdom, and later the Soviet Union, against Germany, because what we were doing in 1939 and 1940 and 1941 was with little risk to us. It took no real courage for us to give assistance to the UK and USSR then.

Now, it does. But there is a point at which courage stops being courage, and devolves into pure madness, and that point is when you go to war with an enemy with a strategic nuclear arsenal. Just one Soviet Russian Проект 955 Борей SSBN could obliterate every major city on our east coast.

In the movie War Games, the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer, initially tricked into starting a Global Thermonuclear War, analyzes all of the variants, and finally says, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Yup, that’s right!

References

References
↑1 Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already against the law in every state in the union.

I am reminded of the federal ‘hate crimes’ trial against the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. The georgia state court had already sentenced them to life in prison, two without the possibility of parole, and the third ineligible for parole for thirty years. How much more punishment could we give these guys with the federal hate crimes convictions? It’s not like we can keep their corpses in prison for years and years after they’ve already died.
Posted on by

The new complaint from the left: we are treating Ukrainian refugees differently from Middle Eastern ones

Robert Stacy McCain noticed this before I did, but I have an excuse: I was working in my shop, finally repairing a small sidewall workbench in my shop. It’s narrow, primarily used as a sanding station — and too often, a flat surface on which to stack things — and had been damaged and sagging due to last year’s floods. The bench is narrow because I had to leave room for vehicles to pull into the garage. I added support where the plywood bench was sagging, leveling it out, and then added some edge banding using scrap hardwood I had, and if you really care, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Mr McCain noticed that Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times was making the Russian invasion of Ukraine about race, because that’s just what she does.

    Infamous Race Hustler Uses Ukraine War to — You Guessed It — Hustle Race

    by Robert Stacy McCain | March 2, 2022

    The brilliance of Critical Race Theory is that it enables practitioners to see racism literally everywhere:

      Left-wing New York Times reporter and controversial 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was slammed online after accusing journalists covering the Russian invasion into Ukraine of “racialized analysis and language” in their reporting, indicating their “sympathy” for white victims of conflict and refugees in particular while claiming Europe is a fictional continent intended to separate it from non-“civilized” nations.

      On Sunday, Hannah-Jones, author of the debunked New York Times 1619 Project, called on fellow journalists to “look internally” regarding acknowledging their racial biases in their coverage of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      “Every journalist covering Ukraine should really, really look internally. This is why I say we should stop pretending we have objectivity and in instead acknowledge our biases so that we can report against them,” she wrote. “Many of us see the racialized analysis and language.”

      She added, “And honestly, these admissions of shock that this is happening in a European country are ahistorical and also serve to justify the lack of sympathy for other invasions, other occupations and other refugee crisis involving peoples not considered white.”

      Later in the day, Hannah-Jones called the European continent a “geopolitical fiction” intended to separate it from Asia and which led to the “alarm” over an invasion of people who “are like us.”

Further down:

    Would you like me to tell you the most perfect thing here? The author of this Breitbart article is Joshua Klein. You know that this race-hustling stuff has become a losing game for the Left when you see Jews calling it out. And while we’re on the subject of ethnic politics, why do you think there was such a shift of Latino voters to the GOP in 2020? It’s because they are likewise getting fed up with this BLM/CRT nonsense.

    Keep in mind that it’s not as if prejudice against Jews and Latinos doesn’t exist in America, or in the Republican Party for that matter. It’s just that sensible people, whatever their ethnicity or position within the Universal Oppression Matrix, can recognize a scam as obvious as the one being foisted upon us by such “intellectuals” as Nikole Hannah-Jones.

    At a time when we’re teetering on the brink of World War III, nobody wants to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling.

Well, it seems that Mr McCain was wrong: at least the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer thought people would want to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling:

    Infuriated, not shocked: People from the Middle East are noticing that now you care about war in Ukraine | Opinion

    A Syrian refugee and Palestinian in Philadelphia hope the Russian invasion to Ukraine will make people care about their people’s suffering.

    by Abraham Gutman | Thursday, February 3, 2022 | 9:24 AM EST

    The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to an outpouring of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But Ukrainians are not the only people who suffer under oppression. And people from the Middle East, who are used to their plight for justice going ignored, are noticing the difference.

    Moumena Saradar, now 45, was born and raised in Damascus. In 2011, when a brutal civil war started, she was too worried about the safety of her five children to stay. One morning, a sniper started shooting in her neighborhood. “The bullets were just a few feet away from my kids when they were going to school,” she recalled over the phone this week. “We are lucky that they are still alive.”

    Her family went to Egypt in 2012. It was hard starting a new life, especially after they left everything back home. They registered as refugees with the United Nations, and were chosen to come to the United States. But her struggle was not over. “It wasn’t easy at all. We were going through one year of interviews with different agents, officers, background checks — but luckily we made it and we came here in summer 2016.”

    Philadelphia has been her home ever since. She works as a medical translator and as a part-time Global Guide in the Penn Museum, walking visitors through the Middle East exhibit.

    While Saradar waited for refuge, people didn’t talk about Syrian refugees the way they talk about the people leaving Ukraine. On the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump suggested Syrian refugees might be terrorists in disguise, and promised, “If I win, they’re going back.” The sentiment wasn’t his alone. By November 2015, governors in 30 states publicly demanded that resettlement of Syrian refugees halt, and the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution — with the not-so-subtle title American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act — to limit the number of refugees from Syria.

    Today, the refugee discourse feels completely different. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 63% of voters — including half of Republican voters — believe the United States should accept Ukrainian refugees. When the White House announced that it was prepared to do that, right-wing politicians and media didn’t pounce — as many did just a few months ago, when the refugees the United States was preparing to accept were from Afghanistan.

There’s more at the original, but the article fails to consider the obvious: the invasion of Ukraine is categorically different from the internal strike that has afflicted so many nations in the Middle East. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, that was invaded by the military forces of another sovereign nation, and the nearest equivalent we have to that was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Ukraine, though there were Russian separatists in control of parts of two eastern provinces, was not an internal civil war, marked by multiple groups, using terrorism against civilians as one of their primary weapons, and Ukraine didn’t have an equivalent of Da’ish, more commonly known as the Islamic State, trying to impose a radically harsh version of Shari’a, Islamic religious law, on the lands it controlled.

Syria, from where Moumena Saradar came? That was a civil war, encouraged at least in part by the United States during the Obama Administration, and its then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as part of the Arab Spring. The Arabic revolts toppled many authoritarian rulers, only to see them mostly replaced by other authoritarian rulers, but Bashir al-Assad managed to hang on to power in Damascus, leading eventually to the Syrian Civil War, which is still going on today, eleven years after it began. Given the chaos of the civil war, the poor record-keeping in the country, and the difficulties in getting records from the Syrian government, is it any particular surprise that the United States was being cautious concerning the Syrian refugees allowed to enter?

Of course, the United States was involved: the US had several units in Syria, troops sent in under President Obama, though it was supposedly a secret, a secret that isn’t a secret any longer. President Trump wanted to pull all American forces out of Syria, but met with some resistance by the Pentagon, and he didn’t get all American troops out by the time he left office.

Ukraine is part of Europe — the Europe that Miss Hannah-Jones claims is a fictional entity — and Ukraine is right next door to Poland. When the refugees escape Ukraine, they are directly escaping into a NATO nation. If the European nations don’t accept the Ukrainian refugees, they would be bottling them up in Ukraine, in the path of Russian troops.

    One reason for the difference, Saradar says, is the way the crisis is covered by the media. And she has a point. Pundits and reporters have drawn a racist contrast between Ukraine and places in the Middle East that suffered war. News viewers have heard that Kyiv is a “civilized city” and that the civilians at risk have “blue eyes and blond hair.” An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about the war in Ukraine opened with: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts.”

Kyiv absolutely was a civilized city, a European civilized city, in ways that Damascus and other Middle Eastern capitals simply are not. Many of the European nations which have accepted Middle Eastern refugees are experiencing significant cultural shocks, as Arab Middle Easterners are bringing in customs and morés which are far more different from those of Europeans than would be those from Ukrainian refugees.

    Jude Hussein, 24, has also noticed the difference. She is a member of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Millennial Advisory Commission who was born in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the territory of the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. I asked her how it felt to see an outpouring of support to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. “It wasn’t shocking, but it was infuriating,” Hussein responded. “The same human-rights violations that are happening now in Ukraine have been happening for decades in Palestine.”

    This is a dynamic Hussein has gotten used to. “When Europe is on the line, whether it is a violation of human rights or international law, the world has their eyes wide open and they are willing to act on such violations. But when it comes to the Middle East, and Palestine, especially as brown people, the world always shies away.”

The Inquirer article included a photo of Miss Hussein, who certainly doesn’t look all that “brown” to me! The caption on the photo shows Miss Hussein, “a Palestinian American, celebrating International Palestinian Solidarity Day in Philadelphia on November 29, 2021.” In other words, she was demonstrating against Israel, an American ally, and the only truly democratic and civilized nation in the Middle East.

    She’s right: Less than a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pennsylvania started looking at ways to divest from Russian companies — including removing Russian vodkas from state liquor stores. Gov. Tom Wolf called the removal of Russian products “a show of solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine, and an expression of our collective revulsion with the unprovoked actions of the Russian state.”

    This was the same Tom Wolf who in 2016 signed a bill that prevents the state from contracting with businesses that boycott Israel. At the time, the governor said that Pennsylvania “will not encourage economic punishment in place of peaceful solutions to challenging conflicts.”

Let me be frank here: the United States does, and should, favor Israel, and ought to disfavor her enemies. The Arab nations and cultures sponsor terrorism and anti-Americanism, as part of their cultures, and we ought to be much more suspicious about admitting refugees from those nations — were I President, the number of such refugees admitted to the United States would be zero — into the United States. They do not add to our nation, but increase division, just as Miss Hussein was doing when she was demonstrating against Israel.

Ukraine is not our enemy, and Ukrainians don’t hate the United States and the West. The Ukrainian refugees ought to be settled in Europe, not the United States, and this ought to be seen as a European problem, not ours. But I have no problem at all with Western democratic governments, and people, recognizing that Ukrainian and Middle Eastern refugees are not identical.