We are coddling fifth-columnists at home. Openly pro-Russian and openly pro-Palestinian elements are accepted as members in good standing of the Republican and Democratic parties respectively. The US administration has tried to dictate and restrain where and how Ukraine and Israel can act militarily against the forces of genocidal totalitarianism seeking to destroy them, to their detriment and likely with the effect of prolonging the fighting. There are those here who advocate forcing the embattled democracies to give up Donetsk and Crimea / the West Bank and the Golan Heights (perhaps in the guise of a "Donetsk People's Republic" or a "Palestinian state"), because those regions are majority Russian-speaking / majority Arabic-speaking, which would reward the aggressors and put them in a stronger position for a future attack, exactly as when democratic Czechoslovakia was forced to give up the German-speaking Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in 1938. In both cases there are calls for ceasefires to take the pressure off the mass-murderers and gang-rapists, allowing them to regroup and strengthen their positions to commit further atrocities.
(Some people seem oddly startled that the struggle against genocidal evil is often a messy and bloody business. As with Gaza, the Allied bombing of Nazi Germany killed a lot of innocent civilians, and that was unfortunate, but there was no alternative. The Nazi regime was so evil and dangerous that it had to be destroyed whatever the cost. The same is true of Hamas.)
To its credit, the US has been mostly supportive of both Ukraine and Israel in practice. But even the occasional limits or delays in supplying certain types of weapons have doubtless led to avoidable casualties and delayed the eventual victory.
Real peace can be achieved only by the annihilation of Hamas and the toppling of the Iranian theocracy and the Putin regime. Trying to reach a negotiated settlement with those butchers is as insane as trying to reach a negotiated settlement with the Nazi regime in early 1945 would have been, allowing it to survive and recover and cause more mayhem later. Wars end when they are decisively won. As in the 1930s, our role is to ensure that it's the democracies who win.
[Image at top: oil facility at Proletarsk, Russia, burning out of control after Ukrainian drone attack]
I was really hoping Biden would step up, particularly in Ukraine, perhaps feeling some freedom of maneuver now
ReplyDeleteBut he & Jake Sullivan have this deep-seated fear of escalation to me that just makes no sense at all, the Russians got nothing left in the tank- and NO use of nuclear weapons on any scale would benefit them
I was hoping he’d fire Sullivan, that’s most of the problem. Blinken is much better.
But both of them and Lloyd Austin have said they’re not going to stick around, so Kamala would be starting fresh
And she certainly making a lot of the right FP noises at the convention
Coach Walz has also long been a good friend to Ukraine
You might see an Adam Kinzinger or Mark Kelly as secretary of defense 🤷♂️
Looking forward to getting Trump out of the way and focus on victory there, healing our society at home
It’s time to administer justice for Trump‘s lifelong crime spree as well
This country can’t wait to turn the page on this rancid Trump era
You can feel it
I can support restraint in one area -- direct combat between Russian and NATO forces needs to be avoided, since that could all too easily escalate into a nuclear exchange even if neither side intended that to be the result from the start. Putin has been just as careful to avoid direct combat between Russian and NATO forces, for the same reason. Nuclear war cannot benefit anyone. But there's no longer any reason to restrict Ukraine's use of the conventional weapons we've given them, nor to limit what kinds of conventional weapons they can have. The US is still imposing hairsplitting rules about exactly what weapons they can use inside Russia, and even in which parts of Russia. We need to be going all out to help Ukraine expand the Kursk salient. It's just the kind of bold move that could finally end this -- failure to defend Russian territory is the kind of humiliation that could bring about Putin's overthrow.
DeleteThe possible gain here -- collapse or at least extreme weakening of the Russian state -- is of such value as to justify taking some risks. And failure to shorten the war is itself dangerous. The longer it drags on, the greater the risk of an accident or error that could lead to direct Russia-NATO combat and global disaster. We need to help Ukraine win this thing quickly.
It's a positive that Harris has people around her who are strong on this issue. I hope, but am less confident, that the same will hold true with support for Israel.