I've tried to think less about Ukraine recently, as 1) the situation's been much more static for the last six weeks or so than it's been since the beginning, so there aren't major developments every day or two,... and 2) pondering the catastrophic failure of the US government to act in reasonably sane ways is just so fucking depressing you can't ponder it for too long without wanting to off yourself.
(I did take an invitation to join a private group-tour at the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village in Manhattan last week. That was very cool, and very moving. Made me love the Ukies --and despise the Russians-- even more than I already did.
If you've taken the trouble to know at least a little about their country and culture, and about their war for survival, you get lots of love and appreciation from the folks there.)
Still, I was thinking over the big picture a little today, and felt moved to try and summarize it. (This is long.):
To anyone with even a modest knowledge of history, and minimal comprehension of 21st-century geopolitics, it was really obvious from the beginning of '22 that Putin's attempted conquest of Ukraine was going to be a pivotal event in the history of the world.
If he was allowed to get away with conquering/destroying/murdering a peaceful sovereign nation of 40 million people --one bordering multiple NATO countries, which should already have been taken into NATO itself long before; which depended on guarantees of protection from the US and NATO, for which we convinced them to surrender both their nuclear arsenal and a powerful conventional one-- then we'd have taught the Hitler-clone Putin he could get away with anything,... and he'd be certain to push on with whatever mass-murderous hegemony he felt like, secure in the knowledge that we'd do nothing to stop him.
He'd destroy and enslave Ukraine, murder untold millions of its people, push ahead and do the same in Moldova and the Baltics, eventually aim to repeat it in Poland, and boldly support and foment similar hegemonous aggression by his puppets and proxies all around the world.
This would mean, among other things:
1. He'd eventually be at war with NATO directly, which would likely mean the US gets sucked directly into an honest-to-God ground war in Europe, with our soldiers fighting and dying there.
2. It'd end up costing us vastly more than any piddling contribution we might've been asked to make for the defense of Ukraine.
3. The danger of our ending up in world-threatening nuclear war would be vastly greater than it would if we'd stood up to Putin earlier.
4. We'd see totalitarian butchers around the world invading and slaughtering their neighbors, as they'd now decided they were likely to get away with it.
5. Among those, the likelihood of Xi's China invading Taiwan would hugely escalate, and that in itself would gigantically escalate the risk of apocalyptic global war.
6. The fascists in India, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, the US, and everywhere else in the fucking world would be hugely emboldened and would redouble their efforts to undermine democracy, decency and progress everywhere on Earth.
7. The economic and environmental damage wrought by all the above would in the least be really awful, and at the worst utterly devastating, to the whole planet.
8. The whole world would learn --once and for all, for all time-- that the word of, promises of, and alliance with the US and/or NATO were utterly worthless.
9. All the above would very likely precipitate a wave of fascist takeover around much of the world --one that could conceivably prove permanent.
10. Putin's survival and continued hold on his throne, along with all of the horrible consequences listed above, would also directly increase the immediate danger of the US potentially falling to fascist dictatorship itself in a big way, because he'd be empowered to do anything he can possibly think of to help throw the US election to the Giant Orange Shit-Stain --or, conceivably, to some other Shit-Stain who might end up replacing him if we're lucky enough to see him convicted and jailed before the election and the Rethuglicans are consequently forced to replace him with some second-tier Hitler-wannabe.
This is one angle almost everyone in America is completely overlooking. Putin worked really hard to co-opt our democracy by getting Trump elected in the first place, in '16, and succeeded.
He tried really hard to repeat that triumph last time, and Goddamn near succeeded again.
(And please, don't give me any crap about what a 'decisive victory' it was. In our pathetic excuse for a 'democracy,' the pop-vote doesn't matter; only the EC does,... and Trump came terrifyingly close to winning it--again-- by coming super-close to winning in three or four states that just barely ended up in Biden's column.
A swing of ~60,000 votes across four states --out of 155 million-- would've been enough to give it to the Nazis.
To think of it another way, if the pop-vote across the country had shifted by roughly one half of one percent, that would've thrown us into Trump's Fourth Reich.
It would've taken substantially less than that to make it an EC tie --and I don't even want to think about the chaos that would've led to.
It was really fucking close to the end of democracy. And we're still really close now.)
If Putin's still in power for the next year --which he very well could be if we continue to do basically nothing to stop him-- he is going to take it to new extremes to try and steal our election again this time,... and he'll have a shitload of help from all the Putinist Nazi Republican state legislatures, Putinist Nazi R's in Congress, and Elon Musk and lots of other scumbag billionaires and oligarchs. (Not to mention all the Roger Stones, Steve Bannons, Boris Epshteyns, and Paul Manaforts we've --incredibly-- failed to put in jail thus far, for three fucking years of Dem control of the DOJ.)
No one knows exactly what they might try to do this time, but I guarantee the GRU and all the 'friends' they've bought around the world --including the entire R caucus in Congress-- are working really freaking hard on it.
They might fail again, like they barely did last time, but if you don't think this is a serious and frightening thought, you're lost in space.
For ALL these reasons, it was, in short, really important that we not allow that to happen. This was maybe the most consequential geo-political event of the last thirty years --and arguably since WWII. (You can sure as hell make the argument that our failure in this case would end in disaster even greater than the massive catastrophe wrought by Bush/Cheney's insane invasion of Iraq in '03.)
It'd be one thing if the circumstances simply overwhelmed our wherewithal, and it was all just beyond our control.
In reality, it was very much the opposite. We not only had the power to stop it; it would've been really fucking EASY.
Putin's army was vastly overrated, in every way you could think of. He'd bitten off far more than he could likely chew, and had clearly endangered his entire army, country, and personal hold thereon with this completely insane adventure.
In Ukraine, he'd chosen to attack the smartest, gutsiest, most resourceful adversary he could possibly have picked on.
In the 80's, the insane self-immolation of the Russians' invasion of Afghanistan had brought low the whole Soviet Union, and led directly to its collapse. This project was much, much crazier and stupider than that was --and Putin's army was a paper tiger even more overrated than Brezhnev's had been.
The Ukies didn't ask us to fight their war --even though it was mostly our fault that it happened-- they only asked that we help, by basically replacing some of the weapons we'd taken away from them thirty years before.
Our weapons were so much better than Putin's, our 30-year-old obsolete headed for the scrap-pile stuff was fully capable of shredding Putin's army in the hands of the Ukies, and our cost to send lots of it would essentially be negligible. (Those pretending our aid to Ukraine is somehow bankrupting our country are such fucking frauds it's not even worth discussing; in real economic terms, it's costing us very close to nothing.)
Not a single American would be asked to fight, or die, to stop Putin.
A modest contribution of some obsolete fighter-jets, an assortment of outdated missile-systems, and healthy supplies of conventional arms and armor --combined with a serious sanctions-regime to cut off R's ability to fund and re-supply its army of death-- would have been sufficient to not only defeat the Russians and expel them from Ukraine, but to further deliver such a decisive destruction of Putin's army, it would've toppled him from power, neutralized Russia as a major threat to the rest of the world, and hugely elevated the security and economic prosperity of all of Europe and Central Asia.
It would instantly have helped greatly stabilize the situations in Syria, Africa, South America, Southeast Asia --all of which have been horribly poisoned by the malign influence of the monster Putin in the last fifteen years or so— and would seriously have chastened China in its imperial global ambitions as well.
It would powerfully have strengthened NATO and the EU, and generally have moved the whole world decisively in the direction of more democracy and less fascism.
ALL we had to do was give them the weapons they wanted and needed, some modest economic aid, and some serious efforts at economic and diplomatic isolation of Russia.
The benefits over the next twenty years would've outweighed any costs by a factor of a hundred.
So what'd we do?? We FAILED. Never in our lifetimes has there been a military/diplomatic fork in the road with a clearer, more distinct, more black-and-white economic, moral, and pragmatic imperative than this one.
Nothing else has come close.
And we utterly, totally, completely botched it the fuck up.
Biden and his guys --while obviously vastly better than any half-Nazi Republicans-- spit the bit.
They danced around, played games, took timid half- or quarter-measures, worried endlessly about political fallout, about the risk that Putin might get angry and 'escalate' if we challenged him --without any comparable consideration of the massive risks we incurred by failing to confront him-- dithered forever over what might happen next if Putin was toppled,... and also did an incredibly incompetent job of correctly assessing the situation at just about every juncture. (As when the great galaxy-brain genius of Biden's team --nat-sec advisor Jake Sullivan-- convinced Biden at the outset that Ukraine was sure to be instantly overrun by Putin's marauders and there was no point in our trying to help them stop it.)
At every crucial point, we gave zero help at first, and then slowly, grudgingly, eventually deigned to give tiny bits of additional support which was always a small fraction of what it obviously needed to be and should've been.
Thirty tanks we gave them --out of the thousands we've got sitting in storage-- and it took us almost two fucking years just to do that.
Twenty ATACMS missiles (no one seems to know for sure, but it's obviously a tiny number or we'd be seeing them in action) --again from several thousand we're about to literally throw away-- and it took us damn near two years to give any.
Thirty or so HIMARS launchers --out of a thousand or so we've got sitting around doing nothing. Why not two hundred??
ZERO fighter-jets, for two fucking years. And we spent most of that time not only inventing excuses for failing to give them ourselves, but also working really hard to prevent any European allies from giving some themselves.
It's a disgrace.
At every step we forced the Ukies to beg and cajole for every little thing they got, and repeatedly went out of our way to insult and threaten them that the tiny aid we gave them could instantly be withdrawn unless they toed our line and acted sufficiently 'grateful.'
(Grateful for what?? We should be thanking them, for Christ's sake, for fighting our war for us, and destroying the army that's the biggest current threat to the Western world without our having to sacrifice one single man.)
We asked them to do impossible things that no NATO army would ever dream of attempting, and then belittled them if they failed to do it.
We slowly, haltingly, enacted a half-measure regime of economic sanctions against Russia, while doing nothing to cut off the huge supply of Western cash for oil and gas that keeps Putin and his army of genocide alive, little to curtail the business of his coterie of mafia kings around the West who prop up his Nazi Reich, and nothing to prevent Putin-friendly quasi-Nazi 'third-party' governments and businesses from providing the equipment Putin depends on. (German businesses, for example, who provide the heavy machinery that lets him re-equip his army, officially barred from selling to Russia, now simply sell to Kyrgyzstan, and let them re-sell it to Putin.
The German and US and NATO regimes did nothing to stop it.)
Biden's said some nice things, of course, but he's done a small fraction of what's needed.
Why hasn't he used the DPA to help keep Ukraine adequately supplied, and replenish anything we truly need that's in shorter supply??
Why hasn't he directly addressed the country --as FDR did in WWII, and even as the massive war-criminal GWB did in 2003?? He should've been out there explaining, from the very beginning, exactly why this was SO fucking important, why it was so clearly in our own self-interest, why it would be a horrible mistake not to do it, why it would cost us almost nothing, and not doing it would end up costing us SO much more.
Yeah, he's done a little in that regard, but it's so much less than what's been needed in an event of such massive consequence.
As a result of all of this incredibly stupid, short-sighted, corrupt, and self-destructive behavior on the part of the US, we put the Ukies in a basically impossible situation.
All of their incredible bravery and brilliance would not be enough to resist Putin's murderers on their own, without the crucially-needed equipment from the West.
They'd resist anyway, of course. They'd undoubtedly stage the most determined and vicious counter-insurgency the modern world's ever seen. If the Afghan people had managed to inflict enough damage on the Soviets to eventually trigger the collapse of their whole country, it was a sure bet the much stronger and more capable Ukies would inflict far greater damage on Putin and his army, and would very likely eventually trigger another grand collapse. But the cost they'd have to pay in the process might be the total destruction of a huge part of their people, country, and culture (which Putin had been trying hard to exterminate for years already).
Shocklngly --in spite of the horribly inadequate support we've provided-- the Ukies have managed to best the Russian butchers again and again and again.
They're so vastly smarter, braver, and more resourceful than Putin's thugs, killers, rapists, and brain-dead zombies, they've found ways to prevail and advance at every juncture for the last two years --in spite of our essentially giving them up for dead time and again.
When they miraculously --to the shock of the whole fucking world-- turned back the Ruscist invasion in the summer of '22, and managed to expel Putin's butchers from huge swaths of their land, it seemed clear that with just a modest amount of material support they'd be able to carry forward that momentum, oust the Nazi occupiers from Kherson and Zap Province, cut their army in half, cut them off in Crimea, and then expel them from there and probably also from the Donbas region they'd stolen control of eight years before.
Sadly, because the 'Allies' (the US) were SO slow in providing the necessary equipment --and provided such pathetically inadequate amounts of it even when we did finally get anything there-- the Ukies were forced to pause, and wait, for eight fucking months before launching a large-scale counter-attack.
In the meantime, the Nazis were able to built vast networks of defenses --including the biggest and densest mine-fields in the history of warfare-- and were also able to conscript another half million meatballs to replace the ones the Ukies had killed or maimed, and repair or replace a lot of the equipment the Ukies had so effectively destroyed in the preceding stage.
In spite of all that, I (and many other serious observers) genuinely thought the Ukies would still be able to cut through the R army, pierce across Zap to the Sea of Azov, and wreck what was left of Pooty's army enough to send it scurrying back to the Siberian sewers it had come from, and also to damage his regime and his stature so greatly that his own people would very likely topple and kill him.
I was decidedly wrong about that, and there are a handful of reasons for that misjudgment.
1. Like I said, the long delays in getting necessary help to the Ukies forced them into such a long pause, it provided the Nazis a huge advantage with all the extra months it gave them to rebuild, and to fortify their positions.
2. I stupidly thought the R people were a tiny bit saner than they proved to be. Any other people on Earth, after watching themselves and their friends and family get butchered by their leader in the hundreds of thousands for absolutely nothing, would eventually have risen up against him. At the very least, they'd have begun to forcibly resist their own destruction, and rebelled against being sent to their certain deaths in a foreign land that had never posed the tiniest threat to them.
Nope. Not the Russians. 80% of them would rather march themselves and everyone they know into a literal wood-chipper (pretty Goddamn close to literal, anyway) than take any kind of stand against their Emperor.
If it'll get them a few thousand dollars --and maybe a microwave stolen from some poor Ukie family butchered by their boys-- they are happy to sacrifice their sons, their fathers, their brothers, and themselves.
Plus they really like killing people and destroying things, as it's pretty much the only thing they can do that fuels their idiotic, backwards fantasy of Imperial greatness.
I stupidly thought that like any organism with a basic capacity for low-level reasoning, a tiny spark of moral compunction or empathy, or even just a minimal concern for self-preservation, they'd eventually get sick of being mulched for Pooty's glory --and so he and his mafia pals can buy themselves yet another sea-side mega-mansion in Sardinia.
Nope. They are the stupidest; most hateful, amoral, and vile; most intellectually and morally vacuous people on the planet.
Their people make Americans, collectively, look decent, principled, smart, and sophisticated by comparison.
I didn't think that was possible. (A very sad lesson learned.)
They have continued to willingly feed themselves into Pooty's gargantuan wood-chipper, in greater and greater numbers, for two fucking years --and there's no real sign that they're tired of it yet.
Any analysis that relied even in part on an eventual emergence of sanity in the Russian people has proved badly misguided. Of that I am definitely guilty (though I think everyone else is too; I don't think there's any observer of the Ukraine war who isn't profoundly shocked at the utter, all-encompassing depravity of the Russian populace).
I thought they'd eventually refuse to die for Putin's Swiss bank-account, and this in itself would cause the total collapse of his army.
Instead we've seen only occasional and small-scale efforts to resist in any substantive way. For the most part, his meatballs have just continued to kill themselves without question, and this has allowed his army to hold together much better than I and many others thought it probably would.
They're generally horrible at war --as they are at damn near everything else besides drinking themselves to death, and killing and destroying things-- and one Ukie schoolteacher who volunteered for battle is generally worth (just in pragmatic military terms) four or five Russian meatballs. But until they balk at walking themselves into Pooty's wood-chipper to try and gain an extra square meter of rubble in what was formerly Avdiivka, their steadfast insanity has made it much tougher for the Ukies to expel them all than I thought it'd be.
3. As I said, the pathetic lack of a serious sanctions-regime has allowed Pooty to maintain and re-equip his army a little better than I thought he could.
In spite of the Ukies' utterly brilliant efforts at destroying his armor and logistics network, R's been somewhat able to make up for it, substantially because of help from North Korea, China, India, Iran, and companies in NATO countries we've done precious little to stop --and because of the huge revenue-stream from Western purchases of R's nat-gas, which again we could've shut down if we'd cared enough,... but we don't.
A more serious and unified sanctions-effort (which could undoubtedly have been achieved with a little more guts and commitment from the Biden team) would've crippled not just Russia's war-effort, but in fact its entire economy.
As it is, we've done substantial damage, but not nearly enough.
We've completely fucked up (as I predicted a year ago) their aviation infrastructure, for example --with Russian airliners (AND military aircraft) crashing or breaking down almost every day now-- but we haven't done nearly enough to prevent them from getting an endless supply of Shahed suicide-drones from Iran, or a million half-rotten arty-shells from the Little Nut-Job in NK, or from continuing to build missiles they use to blow up Ukie shopping malls every night (which they couldn't do without a continued supply of high-tech components from US and German and French companies).
If we'd made a serious effort to cut them off --as we very clearly should have-- we'd have totally starved their army a year ago, they'd long since have been forced to retreat from Ukraine, and Putin would be rotting in the dirt as he should be.
4. It turns out that the new contours of 2020's warfare (which mostly means the constraints brought about by the advent of drones) make it damn near impossible to launch large armored assaults unless you've got overwhelming force.
If we'd given the Ukies everything they needed --as we easily could have done-- they probably would've been able to do what they hoped to. In the under-equipped state we left them in, it just wasn't possible.
Even worse, our leaders stupidly failed to comprehend that, and tried to force the Ukies into a stupid large-scale thrust in the South --which accomplished nothing except to cost them lots of armor and brave men.
For all these reasons, the attempted Big Ukie Counterattack eventually stalled, and the war fell into something of a genuine stalemate.
Because of that (because we so stupidly failed to properly equip them, and therefore allowed the war to get dragged out for so long --when it could've been largely over a long time ago)-- and because it got dragged all the way into the next election cycle, we allowed the criminal, neo-Nazi, Putinist scum Congressional Repubs to grow bold enough to try and blackmail the government into a complete shut-down of aid to Ukraine.
And now they have largely succeeded.
Six or eight weeks now of near-zero US aid has hugely depleted the Ukies' capacity to wage war, and has now begun to turn the tide back towards Nazi hegemony.
In spite of all the Ukies' incredible, heroic efforts, Putin's beginning to win now --as he's willing to kill a nearly infinite supply of his people, they're too fucking stupid to resist that at all, and the inadequacy of Western sanctions is allowing him to re-build his weaponry enough to make progress, in spite of the fact that the Ukies have managed to destroy more than half the army he started with.
The Ukies, of course, continue to fight heroically --as they truly have no fucking choice-- but the tide is slowly turning against them, and the outlook is starting to turn really dark.
They're trying desperately to engineer a trans-Dnipro attack in Kherson that everyone in the West said was impossible,... and they might conceivably succeed, but the tide in the rest of the country is shifting against them.
The Brits and the Germans are stepping up and trying to make up some of what the Nazis in America have cut off, but it's not gonna be good enough by itself.
Without US help, the Ukies may finally be doomed. And that'll mean all of the global multi-stage catastrophe I outlined above will steadily unfold over the coming months and years.
The craziest piece of all of this is that right now, right at the moment the RepubliNazis here have elected to essentially murder the nation of Ukraine in the service of their fuhrer Vladdy P, it looked like the Ukies might be just on the verge of major progress.
There’ve been lots of signs in the last few weeks that the Ruscist army might possibly be right at the edge of substantial collapse.
It’s entirely possible the Ukies’ incredible campaign of slow, steady destruction of R logistics had brought the whole thing right to the edge of a huge tipping point. But if that was true, it probably won’t matter now, as we seem to have thrown away this historic opportunity forever.
ALL we had to do was give them some fucking weapons. Weapons we don't use, don't need, and will end up throwing away anyway.
That's ALL we had to do. And we have failed.
A pivotal junction in history, and we're utterly blowing it. If we'd acted this way in 1941, we might all be slaves to Hitler's successors today.
Everything the idiots (and liars) who've tried to block or slow down aid --or have simply held back out of sheer cowardice and stupid misjudgment-- told us they were trying to prevent, they are now bringing about.
It may be the saddest thing I've seen in my lifetime. It's going to lead to so much death and destruction it's almost unfathomable.
We've got a short window here to try and reverse it, massively ramp up our support again, and avert this catastrophe, before it's too late.
Maybe the Biden guys will secure some kind of idiotic deal to appease the murderous Putinist Republicans, and start up aid again, but it sure looks like nothing will happen till at least January at the soonest,... and in the meantime, every day we fail, more heroic Ukrainans are murdered, more territory lost, the Ruscist Nazi baby-killers are further emboldened and strengthened, and the prospects get worse and more fraught.
The superhero Zelensky (I really don't know how else to accurately describe him) is flying around the world, begging for help to save his people and country --and our Congress is going home for a long vacation.
Putin's about to commit a massive genocide that's going to lead to worldwide consequences even worse, and Mikey Johnson and Rand Paul are running home to do Christmas shopping or go skiing in Aspen.
It makes you want to vomit for the rest of your life.
To paraphrase Bluto from 'Animal House,' this could've been the greatest triumph for the country and the world since WWII, and instead, these idiots are gonna make it the biggest disaster.
It's just so fucking sad, so stupid, and so awful, it's unspeakable. It sort of makes you welcome the prospect of an ASI taking charge, and turning us all into rocket fuel.
They might just be doing us a favor.
