The other component influencing Western observers is that this is the first time we've seen what a military invasion looks like in real time to the people of the nation being invaded, close up and personal. A perspective that's been missing in other full-scale invasion events, notably the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which might as well have been crafted on a green screen with CGI for broadcast on CNN, as far as most of the viewing audience in the US was concerned.
I was on my multi-year television fast at the time...more people should try that, it's wonderfully clarifying. Many years later, I returned to being a member of the viewing flock, from time to time. But it's never escaped me that almost every scene I see depicted on TV news is a product of carefully crafted professional editing. (The only exception worth noting is found with some C-Span content.) And watching the war broadcasts from Ukraine, every once in a while I find myself saying something like this to the screen: "look, I get that you're emphasizing the sufferings of the Ukrainian people with anecdotes and images in order to appeal to our shared sense of humanity, and draw out our sympathies for the Ukrainians living under bombs. But aren't you laying it on a little thick, with that bloodstained stuffed animal toy?"
I also remind myself that unlike the case with Kyiv in 2022, no one from NBC, CNN, FOX, et. al. was on the ground in the streets of Baghdad in 1991, when the civilian infrastructure of the city was destroyed in a matter of days:
"At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations, and many sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges were also destroyed..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign#Infrastructure_bombing
When US troops revisited that theater of operations twelve years later, the project of rebuilding the country from that destruction was still incomplete. The Iraqis have stories, too.
Zelensky is a TV actor (who bizarrely played the role of the president), who was put into government through the funding of his media billionaire boss, who in turn is involved with the very neo-Nazis in Ukraine that Putin complains have gained too much influence. And you expect him to sound like an actual world leader and to stay anything sensible?
I agree with you, but I think it is also important to weigh the issue of precedent. If Zelensky relents and gives up land in exchange for military withdrawal, then that will set the precedent of Russia successfully gaining territory through military expansion. This could embolden Russia again in the future, which I'm sure must be worrying to Zelensky given that Ukraine will continue to be Russia's neighbor. And it could embolden Russia to try this experiment in other locations, which is worrying to Finland, Sweden, Poland, et al. And of course it worries existing NATO members, that do not want to see an emboldened Russia.
I don't know what a good solution would be. Giving territory to Russia in exchange for some sort of (unenforceable, purely decorative) non-aggression treaty? I just don't know.
“still find the current state of the discourse to be disordered and unhealthy.”
Immediately what came to mind was Anne Hutchison and the Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s, a disordered and unhealthy discourse if there ever was one. All through the years, over and over, we seem to suffer from “disordered and unhealthy” discourse.
I agree that people should try to apply a cost-benefit analysis to all things, just as Chomsky did with respect to the war in Ukraine.
But Chomsky's also wrong. The best path from a pure cost/benefit standpoint is to make the situation so painful for Russia that they (and China) never consider invading a country ever again, and the western liberal order can remain hegemonic.
"to make the situation so painful for Russia that they (and China) never consider invading a country ever again"
So, since neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan nor Iraq have done that for the US, something an order of magnitude worse. Death on an unprecedented scale. The complete destruction of Ukraine in an eternally drawn-out pointless war that kills several generations of young people. Because it would benefit the West. To teach the other imperialists a lesson.
That's pretty much exactly what NATO wants, so you might be in luck.
Let’s say the US tried to invade Iraq and we failed. Our tanks and aircraft raced across the border and were destroyed and our forces forced to retreat. That’s what’s happening with Russia and it’s very different from our experience.
That's my understanding as well. When we invaded Iraq, we won thr conventional war in about a month but lost the drawn out insurgency. What Russia did in Northern Ukraine would be like if the US troops were forced to flea to Kuwait.
1. There's a difference between struggling to set up a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan vs struggling to conquer it (as Russia is)
2. That said, US involvement in Iraq/Afghanistan almost certainly made them less apt to intervene in places like Syria
3. The idea that it's best for Ukraine to just lay down and allow itself to be invaded is not exactly a view that's held by most Ukrainians. Should every country that gets invaded always decide to immediately surrender just to avoid a drawn-out war?
4. The West and NATO are good, actually. Liberalism is good. Try being an ethnic, religious, or sexual minority in a non western liberal country.
Minority rights are much much better protected in Russia than in Ukraine. Ukraine is an aggressively centralizing state, while in Russia, local rights (education, the right to petition the government in a local language, local lawmaking, etc.) are better protected.
Or do you not remember the Minsk-2 agreement and how the Ukrainians reacted to any sort of local autonomy for Donbass?
Seriously, the idea that the US in Iraq/Afghanistan is equivalent to Russia in Ukraine is driving me up a wall.
Did the US fail to construct a liberal paradise in Iraq/Afghanistan? Horribly. Did the US struggle to *conquer* Iraq or Afghanistan? Not even a little. The Iraq War began properly on March 20th, 2003. The US controlled Baghdad by April 9th, and "Mission Accomplished"--premature for the overarching mission of 'build a self-sustaining Iraqi democracy', but certainly true of the military takeover--was declared May 1st. The US took Iraq's capital in 20 days and declared control of the country entire in 42 days. The US lost fewer than a hundred soldiers and had only a couple hundred casualties doing so.
The Ukraine invasion has been going for 53 days as of today. Russia has already apparently given up the idea of taking Kyiv and narrowed its scope from the original "take Ukraine" to "no, we really only wanted the Donbas". It's hard to know for certain, but Russia likely has 7,000-15,000 dead and probably twice that wounded. Russia legitimately miscalculated and their army has not done well in the field against a modern opponent.
There's really not much similarity between the conflicts other than "strong country underestimates how easy it will be to do a thing". Russia's losses in such a short time are staggering. The US got bogged down, sure, but it experienced nothing like the shock that Russia is.
Milley has changed his assessment to a conflict that lasts for literally years. The question for Ukraine isn't what happens in the next month or two, it's what happens in a year or two.
Except the Vietnam war did exactly that. America hasn't engaged in total war with a similar number of soldiers since Vietnam. Iraq was in a lot of ways a lot more restrained than Vietnam, and it's unlikely that America will do something like that in the near future. And realistically for Iraq and Afghanistan these wars were not felt by most people in America in daily life at all, whereas the consequences of the Ukraine invasion is felt intensely by Russians. Russia's invasion of Afghanistan also did a lot to bring down the Soviet Union.
So basically use Ukrainians as pawns to get back at Russia, let them stack up the casualties and destroyed cities just to teach Putin a lesson? This is the narrative of the side that supposedly cares about the people of Ukraine? It's so deeply cynical I can hardly find words for it.
you're aware that the vast majority of Ukrainians are calling for direct involvement by the US into the conflict, right? Is your argument that you know what's better for them than they do? (Or is the argument that claims that Ukrainians want western support is just western propaganda or something)
If they're an American, they have every right to weigh in on what America should do, regardless of what Ukrainians want. Or is your position that Americans don't have a right to discuss American policy?
That's what you're *told* they want. I'm guessing they would have wanted to be left in peace and not have Zelensky and the US leadership use them as pawns to begin with. I also think what they really want is the killing to stop. Our causing a European conflagration is not the only way to do that. This is one of those situations where you're asking the arsonists to come put out the house fire. How well do you think that will work?
People whose country is invaded ten to rally behind their leader and against the invading country. The idea that Zelensky is using the Ukranian people as pawns is kind of ridicilous.
This was one of the most remarkable things I saw during the second Iraq war and Afghanistan: how easily people who couldn't even find these countries on a map suggested others go die there. Many of these are the same people who wanted lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates to "save one life." It's head spinning.
The ethical position is the one which stops the conflict and hostilities as soon as possible and ends this stupid, senseless war. Russia is unequivocally at fault, but that does not mean escalation does the people of Ukraine any favors.
I doubt the individual I responded to here or Freddie (or anyone putatively on the other side of the argument here) would say that the USSR was wrong for resisting Hitler's advance, even if it meant 20 million of it citizens died. Was South Korea wrong for resisting the invasion from the North during the Korean invasion? Was the first Gulf War wrong and should the international community allowed Kuwait to be conquered?
If you think this is all realpolitik and morality norms don't come into play at all, that's totally fine. I'd just like to know why other instances of defense were justifiable while this one isn't. How does one make those calculations?
WWI. Which started because Serbian anarchists assassinated an Austrian Duke.
So Serbia and Austria go to war, why do we care? But it turns out all these European countries had secret treaties for common defense. Pretty soon France and Russia were drawn in, and all hell of common defense treaties get activated and Germany--smelling too strongly of horses anyhow--becomes dominant, looking to own all of Europe, Canada and Australia get pulled in, pretty soon we're there too
"Vast majority" is a statement that needs some verification. The people of east Ukraine may have a different perspective, particular in the Donbas region. Mariupol voted to be independent. Odessa was, at least an area with a Russian-speaking majority.
Wrong about cost/benefit since such calculations must be constrained by feasibility. We are in no position to impose costs on them anywhere approaching what Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan cost us. And we didn't learn from those.
You think Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US more than what the war in Ukraine is costing Russia?
Russia's already lost more lives to the Ukrainian conflict than the US lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined and their economy has been completely decimated.
tragically quite a lot, but I'm responding to someone who's claiming what the cost was to the US.
If the argument that lost Afghan and Iraqi lives is a cost to the US, then I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but I doubt Russia actively trying to enact a genocide cares that much about keeping Ukrainian death counts low.
For that matter, all that Russia need do is attack municipal infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage, etc,) and major Ukrainian cities would soon become uninhabitable.
Meanwhile, if you want "genocide" do you not call that commander of one of the Ukrainian paramilitaries saying before the war that "Crimea would be Ukrainian, or it would be depopulated." Does that not sound like a call to genocide?
Ah, yes, a piece from before Bucha was retaken and before it was clear how thoroughly unimpressive the Russian Air Force was going to turn out to be...
I will agree that it is true that if Putin's only goal was the utter destruction of Ukraine, he could accomplish that far more swiftly and efficiently by simply nuking it until the country glowed in the dark. But the fact that he has other goals as well doesn't make it not genocide.
Irrelevant to the question at hand? As those weren't costs imposed upon the United States and therefore did not result in changes to future action by the United States.
Now, if you're saying that Iraq/Afghanistan mean that the underlying claim that western hegemony is better than the alternative, that's not crazy, but I don't think it holds up when you examine the actions Russia/China take within their extremely limited spheres of control and influence.
Something can be better than the alternatives without being good.
Like US Blacks mostly killing Blacks in Dem dominated US cities, most Iraqis who died were killed by other Iraqis; similarly Afghans.
"We" can't stop US killings (and have any ruling Dems learned any lessons?).
Ukrainian men are fighting to the death against Russian invaders. Lots of killing on both sides; both sides want to control Mariupol & Donbas. The fighting won't stop until the leaders of the fighters agree on who controls the land, and agree to stop fighting.
What does "anti-war" mean when a big country invades? Immediate surrender? or fighting back?
That would suggest fighting 'till the last Ukrainian. It also ignores the risk of escalation if your strategy succeeds and Russian losses mount. That risk includes the (admittedly small) risk of Russian use of tactical nukes if their situation deteriorates.
As far as I can tell Russia is still the most likely winner in this contest, even if it takes years to resolve. Since the current economic sanctions plus aid to Ukraine seem unlikely to realize this goal then what's next? Escalation?
Baffled by how unfashionable it is to want the killing, maiming & destruction to stop and genuinely amazed that anyone thinks it can end without a negotiated peace, let alone almost the entire commentariat. It feels like a new low point in public discourse. Thanks for standing apart from that.
Nope the further we kick the can down the road the bloodier it gets. Do you think Putin wants to be the Czar or a reunited Russian/Soviet empire? As the magic eight ball says - all signs point to yes.
"I think no one here (or anywhere really) trusts Putin to abide by the terms of any negotiated peace. Do you?" I don't trust any country to abide by any negotiated piece if it goes against their interests. At least that seems to be how the world works to me.
I think your approach to Putin has got the meolodramatic good/evil approach Freddie is complaining about. My guess is he's a rational actor, of course an asshole too, but he'd stop this war if it was in his interests to do so. And it's also true we can possibly never meet those interests. But it is worth trying for sure.
Rational in that he'd change his goal if necessary. Of course, I don't know this for sure, but based on the fact he's survived this long he probably has made a compromise or two to stay in power.
But there really are evil leaders. Bush, Obama, Biden? Not evil. Putin, Hussain, Isis, Taliban? Evil. (Though I didn't support invading Iraq.) Yes there's some stuff in the middle. (Israel & Palestine). And some countries just have idiots in charge. (Trump, Boris etc.) But sometimes it really is clear cut. Most informed Russians know that Putin is a sociopath. I don't think he's rational at all.
Barring the possibility of a complete Russian victory, how on earth could it possibly end without a negotiated peace? It's just a question of how many more need to die before both sides feel they can make sufficient concessions.
Much like with Afghanistan and Iraq, the simple rubric of "If your answer for how this ends sounds like it comes from a movie we should probably rethink this" continues to be helpful.
William Burns wrote that in all his years of diplomacy he never met a single member of the Russian elite, whether liberal or conservative or communist or whatever, who didn't think that Ukraine was absolutely essential to Russia's national interests. What's the justification for believing that anybody that came after Putin would be better?
Burns wasn't making a broad statement about the imperialistic sociopathy of Russian elites. The statement that "Ukraine is absolutely essential to Russia's national security interests" is axiomatic, underpinned by objective facts of cultural and physical geography, trade economics, ethnic overlap in the resident populations of both countries, and history. That reality was widely acknowledged by US policymakers in the post-Cold War 1990s.
The scope and ambition of the Russian position on that issue is in fact rather more modest than the Monroe Doctrine, which has for the last 200 years applied the concept of the "vital national interest" of the United States to every nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Is Putin abiding by the terms of the dissolution of the Soviet Union? No, Russia declared Ukraine sovereign and in exchange Ukraine surrendered her nukes.
I think you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, which the United States had declared non-binding when it wished to sanction Byelorus in contravention of that Memorandum.
as someone who is in favor of a negotiated peace i have been a little baffled by the calls to stop military aid to ukraine. why would russia negotiate a peace if they can just easily win the war because ukraine is out of ammo?
This seems to essentialise things to ‘you either want Ukraine to be routed or Putin to be militarily defeated’. As if no other course than zero sum is possible.
No. Negotiations depend on both sides having actual leverage. Which is why Putin didn't really negotiate before going in. He made a set of wild demands and then tried to impose those he could. Negotiations are happening now, far too slowly, but only because he's realized he probably can't get everything he wants through use of force.
if you want to avoid a negotiated peace, those are the two options you want. if you would like a negotiated peace, you need things to end up somewhere in the middle.
Read some of Kazparov's tweets. I don't think the Chomsky/Greenwald/Hedges crowd realize just how evil Putin is. Until he's dead or out of power, it kind of is zero sum. (Just like with Isis.)
What makes you think Putin isn't gonna' use nukes no matter what we do? This may sound hawkish but I hope the CIA is working on a way to take Putin out. That might be the only solution.
Even if you think he's evil, if you ALSO think he's going to definitely win (unless we jump in there and risk WW3, and no thank you) they might as well surrender now to prevent more death and destruction. He's going to die at some point.
Fair take. As a matter of preserving the principles of international law, it is deeply unsettling that Russia should gain control of any territory by force, even as a result of negotiations.
One can envision an internationally-acceptable negotiated peace with the Dunbas and Crimea to emerge as sovereign nation-states with shared Ukrainian / Russian territorial access (e.g., Black Sea naval bases)
But Putin’s position would have to weaken considerably before he’d have reason to accept those terms.
And there is exactly no evidence, and mountains of contrary evidence to back this up. The US did not go to Iraq for oil, no outside country took control of any of Iraq's oil. Iraq remained in possession of Iraq's oil.
This is the lamest kindergarten non-intellectual excuse ever.
What are you missing??? You're suffering from a collective mainstream-media amnesia about the whole Iraq problem. There was a larger laundry list, of I think 121 reasons to go to war in Iraq. This list has since been scrubbed from the web.
We didn't go to war in Iraq over just weapons of mass destruction ... those weapons did once exist, but somehow disappeared in an eleven mile long convoy to Syria, news of which also seems to have been scrubbed. Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons, and oft boasted of his nuclear mujahedeen, a cadre of about 10,000 nuclear engineers and physicists working to produce nuclear weapons. Yes, the Chadian uranium was just one small splinter of this. The whole Valerie Jarrett thing was a deep-state mislead, where internal political factions within the state department work sometimes against whatever current administration, or even overall American goals in favor of higher globalist goals ... as was revealed by the pursuant congressional investigation.
If you weren't cognizant at the time, you'd not know that Saddam proudly boasted; directing, funding, and rewarding terrorism throughout the middle-east and into the west ... suicide bombers and such. I mean, Saddam would go on TV, and proudly announce here's $10,000 for the family of Joe-Blow who bravely blew himself up in X airport killing twenty heretics. It doesn't take too many of these events, and even DannyK would be behind the war.
Nuclear non-proliferation is a thing, the US offers protection to smaller countries in exchange those countries don't pursue a nuclear weapons program ... might be a good thing. However, there is a cost to backing a nuclear non-proliferation program. You might have to go to war against someone like Saddam from time to time to backup your nuclear non-proliferation program. So think about the alternatives to not having a nuclear non-proliferation program, and how bad that could be. Kuwait was part of our non-proliferation protectorate, they could have easily had a successful nuclear weapons program, and lived safely under that deterrence program instead, I donno, what's your call on that?
Saddam sent assassins to kill former president Jimmy Carter, as revenge since Jimmy Carter successfully built a mid-east peace program thwarting Saddam's larger plan of destabilizing the middle-east and gaining land and power. I don't know about your book, but in my book when one government targets officials of another government, that's an act of war which will not go unpunished.
"There was a larger laundry list, of I think 121 reasons to go to war in Iraq. This list has since been scrubbed from the web."
Nothing like that gets scrubbed from the Web. And nothing stops the list from being compiled again.
The trick is that the reasons have to be valid. I've acquainted myself with the arguments, like your stem-winder about Saddam's nuclear program- a claim so spurious that what really needs to be investigated is the provenance chain of that particular propaganda line. I've read- and intend to continue to read- a vast sampling of the supposed "suppressed evidence" for why Iraq needed to be invaded. And I've read and assessed the evidence that contradicts those claims. The skeptics win that one. They're aren't doing sad-assed dissembling and claims that vanish when examined, like the one about Saddam's "cadre of about 10,000 nuclear engineers."
Book recommendation: Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, by John Nixon
Americans opposing R's invasion of U is fine. This piece is in response to the mass freak-out over Chomsky saying we shouldn't shovel guns to U because U is going to lose eventually without USA joining in, and we don't want to do that bc we don't want to go to war with Russia. People can disagree with his assessment that U is going to lose unless we jump in (I personally think NC is right, but that's beside the point), but that's not what they're doing.
His argument is that while yes, we should support Ukraine, eventually the war will end when Ukraine "is destroyed", Russia "is destroyed", or a negotiated settlement is reached. Since he doesn't believe this war will end in Russia being destroyed, and he doesn't want it to end with Ukraine being destroyed, he supports a negotiated settlement which....
....is honestly what everyone else thinks too, although the devil is in the details. (Ukraine and Russia would no doubt both love a negotiated settlement now, but they obviously wouldn't agree on the terms.)
I think valid criticism of Chomsky is that:
1) He may be seriously overestimating Russia's ability to continue this fight indefinitely. He says the Russians "will not be destroyed", which in his framework means they can't lose, and thus will either win or draw but...logistics is a thing. You don't need to destroy all the tanks a country has, just the ones they can manage to get into the war zone. Or keep fuelled.
2) Which brings us to the larger problem; he's glossing over the differences between a side being "destroyed", being rendered unable to effectively fight, and losing the will to fight. In his framework, there's no room for "they could keep fighting, but mounting casualties have led to domestic political pressure to unilaterally withdraw". An attempt may well be made by Russia to push the borders in the Donbas forward incrementally, dig in, and declare "victory", not because they have been "destroyed", but because they are unwilling to continue fighting. Historically, wars have ended like that, and while Chomsky says there's no "third way" to end a war, that's not either of the two ways he lists.
3) More broadly he's ignoring the possibility of stalemate that lasts long enough it becomes the status quo. But lots of wars end like that! For example, the Korean War. However imperfect the armistice may have been, South Korea is a future that Ukraine would dearly love to achieve.
My personal view is that the Current Affairs interview is just a bad interview, that it gave many people a misleading view of what Chomsky thinks, and it's triggering a lot of angry take-downs of a straw man. Whereas what Chomsky actually seems to think is that we should continue giving Ukraine weapons, we should avoid triggering WWIII, and we should be trying to engineer a negotiated settlement that both sides can live with and which will lead to a lasting peace.
And that is very reasonable! It seems likely now that the war will end with Russia controlling Crimea and Ukraine controlling the vast majority of land outside it. The remaining questions are around the status of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and a land bridge to Crimea. Supporting Ukraine until Russia agrees on a ceasefire that leaves the breakaway republics with their pre-war borders in exchange for international recognition of the annexation of Crimea is not an absurd outcome to hope for at this point, perhaps combined with some fig leaves around renaming a few Ukrainian streets, recognising Russian as an official language, and officially accepting that Ukraine will not join NATO (but can join other alliances).
There's no anti-war left. Or right. There's a tiny anti-war-from-principle group and the rest are opportunists who pretend to be anti-war because whichever political group they hate is out front pushing the war.
Agreed - it seems to be much more about wars we don't like vs. ones we do: which ones are a symbol of our morality vs. which ones are a symbol of our immorality (however one's tribe defines "morality").
Pretty sure the moment the American anti-war left died by CooCoo’s-Nest-style pillow-suffocation was when Obama was elected as an anti-Bush candidate only to continue many of the same policies.
I totally get what FdB says about the 9/11 moment comparisons. There was, like, 10 minutes of warm national unity before you realized you were passively unzipping for the war orgy just to show you didn’t hate America. It feels that way now about the trajectory of the Ukraine conversation.
Most of the anti-war left was just the contrarian-left wearing an anti-war mask, because anti-war-left is a more convenient moral high-ground than merely contrarian-left.
What people don't realize about Ghandi, is Ghandi wasn't anti-violence, Ghandi was anti-loss, and correctly saw that violence against the British Army wasn't a path to victory.
Anti-war is the cloak you wear when your side is vastly outgunned.
We held back the Communist killing fields in Southeast Asia. Eventually we lost resolve and they happened anyway.
We stopped the Communist Killing fields in the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel. We've held this line for 60+ years.
We held together the middle east.
We stopped Cuban backed Communist killing fields in Central America
We stopped ethnic cleansing in Southeastern Europe
We held the Communists back at Eastern Europe
We took out Saddam. Remember, this is a guy who boasted funding suicide bombers around the world. Saddam went on TV and praised the killer, boastfully provided lavish cash rewards to the killer's family. Saddam employed a Nuclear Mujahedeen of 10,000 engineers and technicians tasked with building nuclear weapons. Saddam fired chemical weapons at our allies in the middle east. Saddam attacked people we vowed to defend as part of nuclear non-proliferation. Saddam sent assassins to kill former President Jimmy Carter. We made the fatal mistake of thinking the Iraqi people wished to live under a secular democracy. The people of Iraq wish to live under a authoritarian theocracy.
We took out Kaddafi, people forget Kaddafi spread terror. Kaddafi spread terror amongst his neighbors, and terrorized the Mediterranean. Kaddafi bombed civilian airliners in Europe.
It can end when peace is negotiated with Putin's successor. Don't forget that Putin is a dictator, his interests are not the same as the interests of Russia or Russians.
The question is, what should the terms be and how involved should the US be? Now, there's a real problem of coordination here as some of what Putin wants the US/EU can't give him (Ukrainian concessions) and some of what he wants Ukraine can't give him (relief from sanctions). Presumably there's some back door conversations going on, but if not, that is admittedly bad and a problem.
But more broadly, there's a tendency to take political statements made by western politicians to 'domestic' audiences as sacrosanct declarations of policy and Putin's political statements as...political statements for domestic consumption. Which is pretty silly.
IOW, I think this is just an extension of the larger political mood that fighting for social justice/your rights as an American primarily entails loudly criticizing the people you disagree with. Ukraine-related matters are just some low-hanging fruit where you can do something righteous by “speaking out.”
I think there is certainly a place for that. But it’s not healthy to define oneself as a contrarian and object to things only to feed your inner contrarian.
I think complex issues of war and peace are the very hardest to figure out, so it's surprising to me that you think the only reason someone might diverge from the consensus is contrarianism.
I actually agree with Freddie on the point of censorship. Although clearly propaganda outlets like RT might be in a grey zone. But basically, yes, we need to hear the Freedie's, Chomsky's and Glenn Greenwalds.
Everyone being on board with a reality that is extremely complicated and multifaceted _should_ give any thinking person the willies. That’s practically the point.
A war is never as simple as Good Guys v Bad Guys or “my country right or wrong.”
Letting a psychopath run over weaker neighbors, raping pillaging and plundering is also bad.
Putin apparently wants to wipe the earth clean of Ukrainians, doesn't this carry even the faint scent of badness that we had to stamp out 80 years ago?
What does the end game of allowing Putin to build a network look like?
You seem to have utter faith that the messaging we're getting and the reporting we're being subjected to is unimpeachable -- all of it white hot, unexamined, stripped of context, and led by those totally trustworthy cheerleaders-with-a-perfect-record, the neocons.
Yes, I have my doubts. But the overall picture is of Putin threatening every one of his neighbors, several excursions into CIS nations, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine on multiple occasions, poisoning dissidents ... did you somehow forget Putin was part of the KGB, and a self described hooligan ... those aren't the credentials of a decent man.
Is the argument really about Putin's decency? I doubt anyone among the dissident/contrarian voices is making a case for the man's essential goodness. Hooligan, criminal, autocrat-- call him what you will: Why is the war always all about Putin? Is he so all-powerful that he can do whatever he wishes with Russia's military, its resources, its people? I've been frankly puzzled by the (especially leftist) strain in American thinking that grants Putin a kind of eerie omnipotence -- he manipulates Trump, fiddles with our elections, launches cyber attacks at will. He's like a James Bond villain. Has anyone considered the possibility that it's really Putin who's behind global warming?
I'm not the first, even in these comments, to suggest that we've lost our collective mind. We jump from one hysterical bandwagon to the next -- Ukraine is the latest global mental breakdown. The problem is that, unlike the other breakdowns we had, this one involves nukes.
Does Putin manipulate Trump, or does Trump manipulate Putin? Now that is the question. Trump, a recognized hard-ass who cuts resort deals and pageant deals all around the world didn't knuckle under to Putin on a resort in Russia.
So, just whom is the master deal-cutter, Trump or Putin?
Apparently, with willing abettors of the American Media, Putin was able to manipulate the news cycle for 4 years. Hunter Biden is on record saying the real Putin kompromat tape is of him.
This is completely meaningless. For the war in Ukraine there are many, many specific issues that have been introduced as arguments against escalation by the West.
1. Russia's nuclear arsenal
2. The economic impact on the world
3. The implausibility of deterring Russia from a region which they have historically held as a vital national interest
In response to those specific points what do you have to offer? What is essentially an ad hominem attack--the only reason anyone could have for dissent is contrarianism.
You're still attacking him and not his argument, which he laid out in detail. Attacking the messenger says to me that you probably can't attack the message.
Excellent, reasoned, restrained (by which I mean logical) analysis. The level of hysteria, the pumped-up macho Russia-bashing, the refusal to see Putin as anyone other than Sauron is terrifying, and the swift, furious, and almost universal *moral* condemnation of anyone who dissents smacks of nothing so much as "splitting" (in psychological terms.) It's as though the Western world is suddenly suffering from a severe case of borderline personality disorder. Of course, many of the loudest screamers have already cut their teeth on earlier bouts of cancel culture, so they're getting better and better at it.
I have been in favor of arming Ukraine. But I admit that as this drags on, and the body count grows, I wonder if we should have just let Russia take it.
We watch international news every night, and after a quick “This report contains upsetting images” they show what’s happening. The bodies, the sobbing mothers, the disfigured and traumatized kids.
I keep coming back to this: If I had to choose between Putin ruling America and my son’s life, I’d choose my son in a second. Maybe that’s wrong but it’s true.
There are no good choices, but I wonder if people would be better off at home with their families, under an awful occupation, than losing their homes and spouses and kids in this carnage. I really don’t know anymore.
Since their initial plan failed, they've been bombing cities and civilians for weeks. I believe that under occupation fewer civilians would be killed. Obviously I don't like either option, but if our current foreign policy = a higher total body count, isn't that something to consider?
I don't think Russian control of Ukraine would end the violence, it could just lead to an endless counter insurgency similar to our adventures in the Middle East.
I find it hard to have any strong opinions on thus conflict because it involves so many layers of things that are hard to understand and predict. Think of how much you've heard thus far has turned out to be completely wrong.
How does your theory play out in reality? Any talented sociopath in power then gets to rule the world as he would gladly give the lives of millions, including members of his own family, for his own glory.
Are you serious? He's out to "exterminate" every Ukrainian? Excuse me, but that's either ridiculously hyperbolic or demented. Putin wants the Donbas. And he doesn't want NATO on his border.
I think Putin would happily murder every single Ukrainian, if that's what he had to do to assert Russian control over Ukraine. He is a product of the Soviet Union, the same Soviet Union that deliberately starved Ukraine and then sent Russians to repopulate it.
Well no, of course he isn't, but there is tons of writing out there that clearly identifies Putin's belief system at root being the worst parts of Soviet imperialism whitewashed over with Russian nationalism.
According to Russian state media, Putin's plan is to systematically destroy Ukrainian culture through violent mass repressions, lasting decades. The end goal is to destroy the independent Ukrainian state in such a way that it would never be able to recover.
People like Noah Smith (and basically every “center-left” pundit from Jonathan Chait on down) are a mystery to me. Broadly, most of the shit they believe is gospel in the institutions they move in. They’ve won for the most part. And what do they spend their time doing? Punching what remains of the American left—who is nowhere near the levers of power—because of something they read online. “Hmm yes this is pretty troubling,” they say, scratching their chins, and then shit out another piece of hectoring pablum. A bunch of people whose entire politics can be summed up as trying to be the serious adult in the room, but without any of the discernment or insight an actual adult would have.
I'll be the annoying guy who again stresses that America's great sin is that we never had a reckoning over the Iraq War. If every last pundit who rallied support for it was treated as the pariah they should be then perhaps we would've had some examples that being the adult in the room should require some level of discernment, wisdom, or accountability.
Let us make a collective bargain that we will find, prosecute, and punish every Russian war criminal, the day after we finish doing the same to the American war criminals.
The Pope came under fire in the public discourse this past week for arranging for a Ukrainian and a Russian woman - coworkers at a hospital - to carry the cross for one leg of the Good Friday procession. The idea was that it sent a bad message, that it was “both-sidesing” the conflict somehow.
We’re in a strange, creepy place when it’s considered a moral betrayal for the Pope to publicly state support for international cooperation and reconciliation between the citizens of warring countries. Everybody loves it when he says he doesn’t have the moral authority to judge gay people, when he washes the feet of prisoners, and when he condemns international conflict. Just not *this* international conflict, somehow.
Thanks for this post. It’s a relief to hear someone talking about how strange and uncritical the discourse has gotten.
...Also, when I say “the discourse,” I’m talking about mainstream news. I take in very little commentary on the Ukraine war and have no sense at all what the conversation is like on social media. I’ve found the fevered excitement for the war unpleasant enough - and honestly, the situation so changeable and the atrocities so hard to look at - that I try as much as possible to just stay up on broad events and not get too deep in the weeds day-to-day.
The mainstream journalism is so emotional, so credulous, it’s also sometimes hard to read. I feel for the people seeing atrocities on the ground and trying to write about them, but the narrative permitted into the actual papers is so thoroughly in lockstep, so obvious in what kinds of facts it will and will not present for public consideration. It’s not that I believe they’re hiding some reason for Russian sympathy from me - it’s that anything that produces this level of chanting-in-unison coverage makes me suspicious regardless of what it is or how much I agree with it.
That's mostly my take, too. I don't really know much about the commentariat discourse. I'm basically mostly hoping for no nuclear war. My hope sounds more than a little callous, because real people are now dying whether there's a nuclear war or not. (And while my sympathies are much more with Ukraine than Russia, I count the Russian soldiers dying as "real people," too. Their deaths are part of the overall loss.)
The whole thing reminds me of the US entry into WWI, a war which Americans had little real benefit from and therefore dissent had to be ruthlessly suppressed, lest people start to get ideas.
Like the war in Ukraine, there was no shortage of atrocity propaganda to keep people in line. While Wilhelmine Germany was not exactly modern-day Sweden, the atrocity tales mostly turned out to be either wild exaggerations, or invented out of whole cloth. (Interesting, the place where the Germans and their allies really did behave as badly as allied propaganda would have it was Serbia, but Serbs weren't the right kind of victims, so little was made of this.)
For that matter, the British and their allies were also not nearly as pristine as the press releases would have had it.
"including Chomsky, other left critics of prolonging the war, and me"
Ah, there it is. The framing that is the root of the problem. "Prolonging" a war by assisting the defenders.
"It is nonsensical to claim that an American has no right to an opinion on conduct by America’s government."
Who is claiming this? Chomsky et al are being attacked for believing the Ukrainian must simply bow before either Russian aggression or U.S. demands.
"Russia possesses a large and advanced military"
And every Javelin we or our allies provides chips away at this a bit more.
"I think that living as part of the hegemon has led many Americans to chafe at the idea that there are any obstacles to implementing their will at all, that the world is an entirely pliable entity that will bend to our preferences if we just want it enough."
Do you realize the irony of this line when people like Smith are saying "we should help Ukraine but not dictate to Ukraine" and people like Chomsky are saying "we should dictate to Ukraine the terms of their surrender"?
If this bogs down to a stalemate then that's also quite horrible for Russia, who ultimately has the ability to stop their aggression at any time. The Ukrainians have to concede to an aggressor or fight until the aggressor decides it's no longer worth it. The US and the international community have to decide how to support Ukraine such that Russia very much regrets its decision to invade so as to both help Ukraine and deter future such actions.
For someone with a worldview so strongly based on power differentials that need rectifying, it's odd you seem to evaluate this conflict as if "well life is unfair sometimes" is the end of the story.
Smith, in the section I quoted, literally says Chomsky has zero right to say what should happen next. And this echoes the demands of Ukrainians in the media: we demand American help, and it's none of America's business! Sorry. That's not how democracy works.
1. I can grant you Smith is being hyperbolic at best with his 0% and 100% framing. The U.S. and the international community have some sway here, and if Ukraine were to act irresponsibly in some way then external pressure to change would be warranted.
(I also think Smith is wrong that, but for U.S. support, Ukraine would have already lost. The U.S. was not the only supplier of arms and the Ukrainians have demonstrated a will to fight to the bitter end multiple times.)
2. However, I don't think you're correctly interpreting what Smith said. Nowhere did Smith say an American has no right to question America's involvement in this, or any international issue as a free speech or democracy issue. Smith is criticizing that Chomsky et al believe the U.S. even can simply dictate that Ukraine cease hostilities under terms the U.S. deems appropriate.
In short, I think you're overextending the criticism Smith made to make his side seem less rational as part of your at-least-partially-justifiable concern over less-than-rational-groupthink leading us astray. Instead of Smith criticizing Chomsky for saying the Ukrainians don't have the right to decide Ukraine's fate, you've flipped this to criticizing Smith for denying Chomsky has a right to an opinion about the U.S. involvement (which I maintain was never what Smith said).
And just what would Russian victory look like ten years down the road? Would Russia be a more free and open society? Would Odessa be a welcoming city for western investment or tourism?
NO. Russia would be even more of an armed camp, Eastern Europe and Black Sea states would be trembling armed camps suspicious of any visitor.
All wars are wars of attrition, Russia has a whole lot more resources than Ukraine. The lessons from The Art Of War lend strength to Russian victory.
But let's say there's a negotiated peace. What does that look like? Russia may have lost face, lost a lot of men, and even equipment. But look at how devastated Ukraine is. Every city has been reduced to junk, practically none of the apartment buildings are salvageable public works are destroyed. Just like post war Europe, most of Ukraine will take 30 years to rebuild. Even England still has abandoned cities never rebuilt from WWII.
The Russians are attack in the south and east. Kiev is in the north. The question is what Kherson and Kharkiv look like in the coming months and what Kiev looks like in a couple of years.
It's not a question of who runs out of resources first.
It's a question of how many resources the Russians are willing to lose before they think it's not worth continuing to conquer Ukraine.
Thus far, the Russians have taken heavy losses, which were not sustainable. Hence they withdrew from the Kyiv area to refit and reposition in the east, where it remains to be seen how the fighting will go in the second stage of the war.
Ukraine has been moving around in technicals. Russia is moving around in BTRs and tanks. There are warnings that the Ukrainians are running out of ammo; the west is pumping resources in to help Ukraine, and the main thing we see out of that is Chechen selfies with captured weapons. Russia just hit Lvov/Lviv again. A thousand soldiers surrendering all at once in Mariupol. Etc., etc. But according to western experts, this is somehow a close fight!
Doesn't matter what Ukraine drives around in so long as they can shoot missiles at Russian tanks and aircraft.
The main thing we see out of Western assistance is a bunch of destroyed Russian armor forcing the Russians to withdraw from the Kyiv region and reconsider their strategy.
Most Western experts initially overestimated Russian competence and underestimated Ukraine's. At this point if you think this war is going well for Russia you're willfully deluded. They still might be able to pull out a limited victory in the East, but it came at a far, far higher price than they wanted.
It's not what they're driving around in, it's the fact that they went to having very many armored vehicles to having very few and being forced to drive around in civilian vehicles. So I think if you look a little deeper you'll see that they're not really driving around shooting missiles and tanks and airplanes.
Mostly they're holding fortified positions and hoping for resupply. Which may not be coming, unfortunately, because the Russians have been hitting their fuel depots.
But fine, let's say you're right: why haven't we seen more of Ukrainian victories? The media's on their side, the Ukrainians love to record and spread everything, even the stuff they should probably keep private. Where are all the Russian losses? Even that recent story about Ukrainians calling Russian mothers up mentioned like 600 Russian casualties. Oryx has a bunch of tanks up as Russian losses, but based purely on the photos, most captures and losses are unverified.
People expect a swift victory from Russia, and other than the very very start of the war, there's no indication that Russia's in a hurry, other than wishful thinking on our part for the war to be over.
First off, the vast majority of the missiles we're giving them are shot by people on the ground, not driving or flying about. Maybe jot that down.
In your strange world where Russia isn't doing poorly, why did they withdraw from the north? Was that not a massive Ukrainian victory?
"There's no indication Russia's in a hurry"
1. We have documented Russian war plans and expectations for how they thought the war was going to go.
2. We saw them do things one does--like overextending airborne troops into Kyiv--when one is trying to quickly seize key objectives far behind enemy lines.
I fear you are legitimately retarded if at this point in the war with all of the available evidence that you think Russia has done just fine. There are Russian nationalists calling for Putin to either quit the war or actually wage war! They are unable to consider Russia has been trying they just suck, but even they can admit things aren't going well!
If you invade a country and hold their territory and they can't kick you out then how is that not winning? There is a move afoot to redefine military victory down to put lipstick on the Ukrainian pig.
How does that come even close to describing what's happening here? Unless you're discussing the unintended blowback of all those sanctions on the global economy and US inflation.
You are mistaken as tot he direction that the goalposts are moving.
The initial plan was a lightning attack on Kyiv down the NW axis and the Sumy axis, and a double pincer through Kharkiv and Mykolaiv to encircle the main Ukrainian army. They take the Capitol immediately, cut off the military from the pro-West base in the west, denazify anyone on the list in the mobile crematoriums, and declare Ukraine reunited with the Motherland at last in a victory speech in Maidan Square.
From the battle plans we plainly observed, and from the rhetoric Russia used before and after the invasion, this is what victory was supposed to look like.
But all attacks *everywhere* bogged down and what was supposed to be quick, clean, and easy turned into a stymied bloodbath. The only place where Russians really *moved* as intended was south, roundabouts Kherson on the Mykolaiv front.
So now they’re scaling back objectives and focusing on the south and the east, trying to carve out as much occupied territory as possible- quite a step down from owning the place outright!
Russia is hitting their targets in the same way that somebody shooting a piece of paper and then using a marker to color around the bullet holes is hitting their bulls-eye.
This is all separate from the fact the Russia has already paid a higher price in material, lives, capital, and international standing than a military victory could ever pay for, not even counting how much more they need to pay to even *get* said victory. A counterfactual Russia that had decided to reverse its build up in December and stay chill would be far better off than a Russia that might finally conquer everything east of the Dnieper by paying 30,000 corpses and 90,000 wounded and a thousand tanks and so on and so forth.
The Russians split their forces up along a bunch of different advances, to the point where any single battle group was too small to make much headway against determined opposition. Think about this: each advance had its own commanding officer. There was no single individual in charge of the whole operation. Any coordination between advancing groups was coincidental.
The obvious question is what would anybody violate standard military doctrine in this fashion? It is stunningly incompetent. The answer is that the Russians weren't expecting the Ukrainians to fight back. Splitting your forces up makes a lot of sense if you think that all you need to do is roll into a city and as a result the enemy will just lay down their arms.
Of course that's not what happened. The point that we should take away is that yes, the Ukrainians are brave and determined, but a lot of the Russian's wounds were self inflicted. What happened after Putin figured out the Ukrainians weren't pushovers? He sacked a bunch of Russia's intelligence community and he put his favorite general in charge of the entire operation. Now the Russians are doing what they should have done in the first place, which is mass all of their forces into one front to attack the eastern portion of Ukraine.
The war this month is not the war from February and March. The tactics have shifted and the enemy has made an adjustment. I predicted way back when this whole thing blew up that the Russians would resort to bombarding and depopulating cities just as they did in Grozny and Aleppo.
Noah Smith wrote a post on April 11th arguing that in the midterms Democrats should "run on the war," since it's so popular. I find that type of thinking to be abhorrent.
In the Haggadah we use for Passover, there's a memorable line. The Egyptian soldiers are drowning in the Red Sea, the angels in Heaven rejoice by singing and God admonishes, "Why are you celebrating when my creatures are perishing?"
In my opinion, there is nothing to celebrate about this war. And I wish American policy was to advocate for any peace deal that both Ukraine and Russia would accept even if it means a complete rollback of sanctions. I've been labeled a Putin supporter for this POV.
“I think most people in 2022 are profoundly disillusioned, in politics yes but also in a broader overriding sense, and feel beset by convincing critiques of every idea, party, movement, and institution in American life.”
Man, what a great way to put it. I occasionally think about how deflating it can be that the internet is full of critiques (often quite good!) about anything and everything you could possibly like. Everything from your favorite band or movie to an institution you’re part of or attached has been eviscerated at some point. I hadn’t really considered how that sense of disillusionment manifests itself in a society or what it leads to, but I certainly am now. As always, appreciate your writing.
The other component influencing Western observers is that this is the first time we've seen what a military invasion looks like in real time to the people of the nation being invaded, close up and personal. A perspective that's been missing in other full-scale invasion events, notably the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which might as well have been crafted on a green screen with CGI for broadcast on CNN, as far as most of the viewing audience in the US was concerned.
I was on my multi-year television fast at the time...more people should try that, it's wonderfully clarifying. Many years later, I returned to being a member of the viewing flock, from time to time. But it's never escaped me that almost every scene I see depicted on TV news is a product of carefully crafted professional editing. (The only exception worth noting is found with some C-Span content.) And watching the war broadcasts from Ukraine, every once in a while I find myself saying something like this to the screen: "look, I get that you're emphasizing the sufferings of the Ukrainian people with anecdotes and images in order to appeal to our shared sense of humanity, and draw out our sympathies for the Ukrainians living under bombs. But aren't you laying it on a little thick, with that bloodstained stuffed animal toy?"
I also remind myself that unlike the case with Kyiv in 2022, no one from NBC, CNN, FOX, et. al. was on the ground in the streets of Baghdad in 1991, when the civilian infrastructure of the city was destroyed in a matter of days:
"At the end of the war, electricity production was at four percent of its pre-war levels. Bombs destroyed the utility of all major dams, most major pumping stations, and many sewage treatment plants, telecommunications equipment, port facilities, oil refineries and distribution, railroads and bridges were also destroyed..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign#Infrastructure_bombing
When US troops revisited that theater of operations twelve years later, the project of rebuilding the country from that destruction was still incomplete. The Iraqis have stories, too.
What is he supposed to say?
Privately, sure. But publicly? That would be an insane thing to say.
Zelensky is a TV actor (who bizarrely played the role of the president), who was put into government through the funding of his media billionaire boss, who in turn is involved with the very neo-Nazis in Ukraine that Putin complains have gained too much influence. And you expect him to sound like an actual world leader and to stay anything sensible?
I agree with you, but I think it is also important to weigh the issue of precedent. If Zelensky relents and gives up land in exchange for military withdrawal, then that will set the precedent of Russia successfully gaining territory through military expansion. This could embolden Russia again in the future, which I'm sure must be worrying to Zelensky given that Ukraine will continue to be Russia's neighbor. And it could embolden Russia to try this experiment in other locations, which is worrying to Finland, Sweden, Poland, et al. And of course it worries existing NATO members, that do not want to see an emboldened Russia.
I don't know what a good solution would be. Giving territory to Russia in exchange for some sort of (unenforceable, purely decorative) non-aggression treaty? I just don't know.
“still find the current state of the discourse to be disordered and unhealthy.”
Immediately what came to mind was Anne Hutchison and the Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s, a disordered and unhealthy discourse if there ever was one. All through the years, over and over, we seem to suffer from “disordered and unhealthy” discourse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson
I agree that people should try to apply a cost-benefit analysis to all things, just as Chomsky did with respect to the war in Ukraine.
But Chomsky's also wrong. The best path from a pure cost/benefit standpoint is to make the situation so painful for Russia that they (and China) never consider invading a country ever again, and the western liberal order can remain hegemonic.
Because only we, as official representatives of the western liberal order, are entitled by divine right to decide which countries are to be invaded.
"to make the situation so painful for Russia that they (and China) never consider invading a country ever again"
So, since neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan nor Iraq have done that for the US, something an order of magnitude worse. Death on an unprecedented scale. The complete destruction of Ukraine in an eternally drawn-out pointless war that kills several generations of young people. Because it would benefit the West. To teach the other imperialists a lesson.
That's pretty much exactly what NATO wants, so you might be in luck.
Let’s say the US tried to invade Iraq and we failed. Our tanks and aircraft raced across the border and were destroyed and our forces forced to retreat. That’s what’s happening with Russia and it’s very different from our experience.
That's my understanding as well. When we invaded Iraq, we won thr conventional war in about a month but lost the drawn out insurgency. What Russia did in Northern Ukraine would be like if the US troops were forced to flea to Kuwait.
And most people predicted that Russia would win the hot war but lose the insurgency, too.
To not even win the hot war is a big embarrassment!
I'm not sure it matters much though whether ones ultimate failure was preceded by fleeting initial success or not.
1. There's a difference between struggling to set up a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan vs struggling to conquer it (as Russia is)
2. That said, US involvement in Iraq/Afghanistan almost certainly made them less apt to intervene in places like Syria
3. The idea that it's best for Ukraine to just lay down and allow itself to be invaded is not exactly a view that's held by most Ukrainians. Should every country that gets invaded always decide to immediately surrender just to avoid a drawn-out war?
4. The West and NATO are good, actually. Liberalism is good. Try being an ethnic, religious, or sexual minority in a non western liberal country.
I dunno, the Russian Federation has something like over 100 recognized nationalities.
If you're saying that, actually, being a minority is totally fine in Russia then I really think you should reconsider your opinion.
Minority rights are much much better protected in Russia than in Ukraine. Ukraine is an aggressively centralizing state, while in Russia, local rights (education, the right to petition the government in a local language, local lawmaking, etc.) are better protected.
Or do you not remember the Minsk-2 agreement and how the Ukrainians reacted to any sort of local autonomy for Donbass?
Hmm. Saw the same quasi-lie in RT.
What exactly is untruthful about that statement and what is your basis for claiming so, other that it appeared on RT?
Or is your argument that anything that appears on RT is by definition untruthful?
Seriously, the idea that the US in Iraq/Afghanistan is equivalent to Russia in Ukraine is driving me up a wall.
Did the US fail to construct a liberal paradise in Iraq/Afghanistan? Horribly. Did the US struggle to *conquer* Iraq or Afghanistan? Not even a little. The Iraq War began properly on March 20th, 2003. The US controlled Baghdad by April 9th, and "Mission Accomplished"--premature for the overarching mission of 'build a self-sustaining Iraqi democracy', but certainly true of the military takeover--was declared May 1st. The US took Iraq's capital in 20 days and declared control of the country entire in 42 days. The US lost fewer than a hundred soldiers and had only a couple hundred casualties doing so.
The Ukraine invasion has been going for 53 days as of today. Russia has already apparently given up the idea of taking Kyiv and narrowed its scope from the original "take Ukraine" to "no, we really only wanted the Donbas". It's hard to know for certain, but Russia likely has 7,000-15,000 dead and probably twice that wounded. Russia legitimately miscalculated and their army has not done well in the field against a modern opponent.
There's really not much similarity between the conflicts other than "strong country underestimates how easy it will be to do a thing". Russia's losses in such a short time are staggering. The US got bogged down, sure, but it experienced nothing like the shock that Russia is.
Milley has changed his assessment to a conflict that lasts for literally years. The question for Ukraine isn't what happens in the next month or two, it's what happens in a year or two.
☝🏻This.
Except the Vietnam war did exactly that. America hasn't engaged in total war with a similar number of soldiers since Vietnam. Iraq was in a lot of ways a lot more restrained than Vietnam, and it's unlikely that America will do something like that in the near future. And realistically for Iraq and Afghanistan these wars were not felt by most people in America in daily life at all, whereas the consequences of the Ukraine invasion is felt intensely by Russians. Russia's invasion of Afghanistan also did a lot to bring down the Soviet Union.
So basically use Ukrainians as pawns to get back at Russia, let them stack up the casualties and destroyed cities just to teach Putin a lesson? This is the narrative of the side that supposedly cares about the people of Ukraine? It's so deeply cynical I can hardly find words for it.
you're aware that the vast majority of Ukrainians are calling for direct involvement by the US into the conflict, right? Is your argument that you know what's better for them than they do? (Or is the argument that claims that Ukrainians want western support is just western propaganda or something)
If they're an American, they have every right to weigh in on what America should do, regardless of what Ukrainians want. Or is your position that Americans don't have a right to discuss American policy?
100% everyone here should be able to voice their opinion -- nowhere would I claim otherwise.
I'm just pushing back on the notion that supporting greater intervention means callously using Ukrainians as pawns when they themselves want that.
That's what you're *told* they want. I'm guessing they would have wanted to be left in peace and not have Zelensky and the US leadership use them as pawns to begin with. I also think what they really want is the killing to stop. Our causing a European conflagration is not the only way to do that. This is one of those situations where you're asking the arsonists to come put out the house fire. How well do you think that will work?
maybe it is all western propaganda and this is a huge conspiracy after all
People whose country is invaded ten to rally behind their leader and against the invading country. The idea that Zelensky is using the Ukranian people as pawns is kind of ridicilous.
That’s exactly what you’re proposing if you and all the others who are calling for greater intervention don’t have your asses on the line.
This was one of the most remarkable things I saw during the second Iraq war and Afghanistan: how easily people who couldn't even find these countries on a map suggested others go die there. Many of these are the same people who wanted lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates to "save one life." It's head spinning.
The ethical position is the one which stops the conflict and hostilities as soon as possible and ends this stupid, senseless war. Russia is unequivocally at fault, but that does not mean escalation does the people of Ukraine any favors.
what other conflicts in history would you have applied this to?
"Just give the madman dictator what he wants to stop the fighting ASAP" is a not a strategy that goes well historically, I would say.
Literally Dick Cheney's line in 2002.
I doubt the individual I responded to here or Freddie (or anyone putatively on the other side of the argument here) would say that the USSR was wrong for resisting Hitler's advance, even if it meant 20 million of it citizens died. Was South Korea wrong for resisting the invasion from the North during the Korean invasion? Was the first Gulf War wrong and should the international community allowed Kuwait to be conquered?
If you think this is all realpolitik and morality norms don't come into play at all, that's totally fine. I'd just like to know why other instances of defense were justifiable while this one isn't. How does one make those calculations?
WWI. Which started because Serbian anarchists assassinated an Austrian Duke.
So Serbia and Austria go to war, why do we care? But it turns out all these European countries had secret treaties for common defense. Pretty soon France and Russia were drawn in, and all hell of common defense treaties get activated and Germany--smelling too strongly of horses anyhow--becomes dominant, looking to own all of Europe, Canada and Australia get pulled in, pretty soon we're there too
"Vast majority" is a statement that needs some verification. The people of east Ukraine may have a different perspective, particular in the Donbas region. Mariupol voted to be independent. Odessa was, at least an area with a Russian-speaking majority.
Do you really think that direct involvement by the US is at all plausible?
If not then how is this just not stringing the Syrian rebels again in the forlorn hope that the West would intervene against Assad?
You mean it’s monstrous that some are proposing fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian? Just a little bit.
They care so much and their hearts bleed so much that they’re willing to fight down to the last Ukrainian.
Wrong about cost/benefit since such calculations must be constrained by feasibility. We are in no position to impose costs on them anywhere approaching what Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan cost us. And we didn't learn from those.
You think Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US more than what the war in Ukraine is costing Russia?
Russia's already lost more lives to the Ukrainian conflict than the US lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined and their economy has been completely decimated.
And how much did the Iraqis and Afghans lose
tragically quite a lot, but I'm responding to someone who's claiming what the cost was to the US.
If the argument that lost Afghan and Iraqi lives is a cost to the US, then I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but I doubt Russia actively trying to enact a genocide cares that much about keeping Ukrainian death counts low.
If Russia is trying to enact a "genocide", they sure are going about it funny.
https://www.newsweek.com/putins-bombers-could-devastate-ukraine-hes-holding-back-heres-why-1690494
For that matter, all that Russia need do is attack municipal infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage, etc,) and major Ukrainian cities would soon become uninhabitable.
Meanwhile, if you want "genocide" do you not call that commander of one of the Ukrainian paramilitaries saying before the war that "Crimea would be Ukrainian, or it would be depopulated." Does that not sound like a call to genocide?
Or, if you prefer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICkcyt87Lw0
Ah, yes, a piece from before Bucha was retaken and before it was clear how thoroughly unimpressive the Russian Air Force was going to turn out to be...
I will agree that it is true that if Putin's only goal was the utter destruction of Ukraine, he could accomplish that far more swiftly and efficiently by simply nuking it until the country glowed in the dark. But the fact that he has other goals as well doesn't make it not genocide.
How much have the Ukrainians lost?
How much more would they lose under Russian control?
How much more would they lose without Western assistance?
Irrelevant to the question at hand? As those weren't costs imposed upon the United States and therefore did not result in changes to future action by the United States.
Now, if you're saying that Iraq/Afghanistan mean that the underlying claim that western hegemony is better than the alternative, that's not crazy, but I don't think it holds up when you examine the actions Russia/China take within their extremely limited spheres of control and influence.
Something can be better than the alternatives without being good.
Like US Blacks mostly killing Blacks in Dem dominated US cities, most Iraqis who died were killed by other Iraqis; similarly Afghans.
"We" can't stop US killings (and have any ruling Dems learned any lessons?).
Ukrainian men are fighting to the death against Russian invaders. Lots of killing on both sides; both sides want to control Mariupol & Donbas. The fighting won't stop until the leaders of the fighters agree on who controls the land, and agree to stop fighting.
What does "anti-war" mean when a big country invades? Immediate surrender? or fighting back?
That would suggest fighting 'till the last Ukrainian. It also ignores the risk of escalation if your strategy succeeds and Russian losses mount. That risk includes the (admittedly small) risk of Russian use of tactical nukes if their situation deteriorates.
As far as I can tell Russia is still the most likely winner in this contest, even if it takes years to resolve. Since the current economic sanctions plus aid to Ukraine seem unlikely to realize this goal then what's next? Escalation?
Baffled by how unfashionable it is to want the killing, maiming & destruction to stop and genuinely amazed that anyone thinks it can end without a negotiated peace, let alone almost the entire commentariat. It feels like a new low point in public discourse. Thanks for standing apart from that.
I think no one here (or anywhere really) trusts Putin to abide by the terms of any negotiated peace. Do you?
Well, the track record of Ukraine (Minsk and Minsk-2) is not exactly inspiring.
There’s a way to find out. As there’s a way to find out if Ukraine can win. One is likely bloodier than the other.
Nope the further we kick the can down the road the bloodier it gets. Do you think Putin wants to be the Czar or a reunited Russian/Soviet empire? As the magic eight ball says - all signs point to yes.
"I think no one here (or anywhere really) trusts Putin to abide by the terms of any negotiated peace. Do you?" I don't trust any country to abide by any negotiated piece if it goes against their interests. At least that seems to be how the world works to me.
I think your approach to Putin has got the meolodramatic good/evil approach Freddie is complaining about. My guess is he's a rational actor, of course an asshole too, but he'd stop this war if it was in his interests to do so. And it's also true we can possibly never meet those interests. But it is worth trying for sure.
What does rational actor mean in this context? Putin wants to be the Czar and Autocrat of All the Russias and is rationally pursuing that goal?
Rational in that he'd change his goal if necessary. Of course, I don't know this for sure, but based on the fact he's survived this long he probably has made a compromise or two to stay in power.
But there really are evil leaders. Bush, Obama, Biden? Not evil. Putin, Hussain, Isis, Taliban? Evil. (Though I didn't support invading Iraq.) Yes there's some stuff in the middle. (Israel & Palestine). And some countries just have idiots in charge. (Trump, Boris etc.) But sometimes it really is clear cut. Most informed Russians know that Putin is a sociopath. I don't think he's rational at all.
I could be wrong. Just like you.
If only it were as simple as an episode of Power Rangers.
There is in fact no evidence of this. No one in the West understands Putin; everyone who says they can speak to what he's thinking is a liar.
There is a ton of evidence based on Putin’s own comments and writings.
Barring the possibility of a complete Russian victory, how on earth could it possibly end without a negotiated peace? It's just a question of how many more need to die before both sides feel they can make sufficient concessions.
It could end with Putin getting a bullet to the head and the new Russian leadership withdrawing and pretending it all never happened.
Find a historical equivalent of that ever happening in the modern era (post 1900) and we’ll talk.
Massive instability in leadership almost always leads to more war, not less.
The only good thing about Hitler was he killed Hitler. So there is that example.
So your solution is to turn a regional conflict into a world war in order to remove a single actor?
I’m thinking there’s a few steps we can consider in-between before we consign millions of lives to the mud.
Much like with Afghanistan and Iraq, the simple rubric of "If your answer for how this ends sounds like it comes from a movie we should probably rethink this" continues to be helpful.
Whatever is least movie-like is an elegant heuristic for anticipating least worst outcomes. I’ll remember this one
That worked great in Libya, didn't it.
William Burns wrote that in all his years of diplomacy he never met a single member of the Russian elite, whether liberal or conservative or communist or whatever, who didn't think that Ukraine was absolutely essential to Russia's national interests. What's the justification for believing that anybody that came after Putin would be better?
Why should I believe William Burns?
Because he has a lifetime of work in the State Dept (and is now directory of the CIA)? Or do you think he's lying when he wrote that for some reason?
Burns wasn't making a broad statement about the imperialistic sociopathy of Russian elites. The statement that "Ukraine is absolutely essential to Russia's national security interests" is axiomatic, underpinned by objective facts of cultural and physical geography, trade economics, ethnic overlap in the resident populations of both countries, and history. That reality was widely acknowledged by US policymakers in the post-Cold War 1990s.
The scope and ambition of the Russian position on that issue is in fact rather more modest than the Monroe Doctrine, which has for the last 200 years applied the concept of the "vital national interest" of the United States to every nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Is Putin abiding by the terms of the dissolution of the Soviet Union? No, Russia declared Ukraine sovereign and in exchange Ukraine surrendered her nukes.
I think you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, which the United States had declared non-binding when it wished to sanction Byelorus in contravention of that Memorandum.
You're assuming Byelorussia was blameless?
That's beside the point. It's like saying whether or not Ukraine is blameless. We're trying to have it both ways.
as someone who is in favor of a negotiated peace i have been a little baffled by the calls to stop military aid to ukraine. why would russia negotiate a peace if they can just easily win the war because ukraine is out of ammo?
This seems to essentialise things to ‘you either want Ukraine to be routed or Putin to be militarily defeated’. As if no other course than zero sum is possible.
No. Negotiations depend on both sides having actual leverage. Which is why Putin didn't really negotiate before going in. He made a set of wild demands and then tried to impose those he could. Negotiations are happening now, far too slowly, but only because he's realized he probably can't get everything he wants through use of force.
if you want to avoid a negotiated peace, those are the two options you want. if you would like a negotiated peace, you need things to end up somewhere in the middle.
Read some of Kazparov's tweets. I don't think the Chomsky/Greenwald/Hedges crowd realize just how evil Putin is. Until he's dead or out of power, it kind of is zero sum. (Just like with Isis.)
What makes you think Putin isn't gonna' use nukes no matter what we do? This may sound hawkish but I hope the CIA is working on a way to take Putin out. That might be the only solution.
Even if you think he's evil, if you ALSO think he's going to definitely win (unless we jump in there and risk WW3, and no thank you) they might as well surrender now to prevent more death and destruction. He's going to die at some point.
By that logic then Palestinians should surrender to Israel?
Fair take. As a matter of preserving the principles of international law, it is deeply unsettling that Russia should gain control of any territory by force, even as a result of negotiations.
One can envision an internationally-acceptable negotiated peace with the Dunbas and Crimea to emerge as sovereign nation-states with shared Ukrainian / Russian territorial access (e.g., Black Sea naval bases)
But Putin’s position would have to weaken considerably before he’d have reason to accept those terms.
Tell me about international law vis a vis Libya, Syria (still occupied by the U.S.), Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.
Tell you what? That the United States regularly wipes its backside with it--as it did in the cases you mention? Sounds like you’re aware of it.
So Americans have zero right to criticize any other country. None.
International Law died sometime during the George Dubya Administration.
The new rule is "If you have nukes, you can do whatever the fuck you want."
Putin is playing by the new rules established by the USA in the aughts.
I seem to remember that Russia already attempted to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine. Was Ukraine out of ammo then? No.
Whatever happened to the anti-war left? Have the neocons switched parties again?
Oil.
And there is exactly no evidence, and mountains of contrary evidence to back this up. The US did not go to Iraq for oil, no outside country took control of any of Iraq's oil. Iraq remained in possession of Iraq's oil.
This is the lamest kindergarten non-intellectual excuse ever.
Sure. You're right. No one ever said we're after the oil. /s
What are you missing??? You're suffering from a collective mainstream-media amnesia about the whole Iraq problem. There was a larger laundry list, of I think 121 reasons to go to war in Iraq. This list has since been scrubbed from the web.
We didn't go to war in Iraq over just weapons of mass destruction ... those weapons did once exist, but somehow disappeared in an eleven mile long convoy to Syria, news of which also seems to have been scrubbed. Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons, and oft boasted of his nuclear mujahedeen, a cadre of about 10,000 nuclear engineers and physicists working to produce nuclear weapons. Yes, the Chadian uranium was just one small splinter of this. The whole Valerie Jarrett thing was a deep-state mislead, where internal political factions within the state department work sometimes against whatever current administration, or even overall American goals in favor of higher globalist goals ... as was revealed by the pursuant congressional investigation.
If you weren't cognizant at the time, you'd not know that Saddam proudly boasted; directing, funding, and rewarding terrorism throughout the middle-east and into the west ... suicide bombers and such. I mean, Saddam would go on TV, and proudly announce here's $10,000 for the family of Joe-Blow who bravely blew himself up in X airport killing twenty heretics. It doesn't take too many of these events, and even DannyK would be behind the war.
Nuclear non-proliferation is a thing, the US offers protection to smaller countries in exchange those countries don't pursue a nuclear weapons program ... might be a good thing. However, there is a cost to backing a nuclear non-proliferation program. You might have to go to war against someone like Saddam from time to time to backup your nuclear non-proliferation program. So think about the alternatives to not having a nuclear non-proliferation program, and how bad that could be. Kuwait was part of our non-proliferation protectorate, they could have easily had a successful nuclear weapons program, and lived safely under that deterrence program instead, I donno, what's your call on that?
Saddam sent assassins to kill former president Jimmy Carter, as revenge since Jimmy Carter successfully built a mid-east peace program thwarting Saddam's larger plan of destabilizing the middle-east and gaining land and power. I don't know about your book, but in my book when one government targets officials of another government, that's an act of war which will not go unpunished.
Todd Smekens, is that you?
"There was a larger laundry list, of I think 121 reasons to go to war in Iraq. This list has since been scrubbed from the web."
Nothing like that gets scrubbed from the Web. And nothing stops the list from being compiled again.
The trick is that the reasons have to be valid. I've acquainted myself with the arguments, like your stem-winder about Saddam's nuclear program- a claim so spurious that what really needs to be investigated is the provenance chain of that particular propaganda line. I've read- and intend to continue to read- a vast sampling of the supposed "suppressed evidence" for why Iraq needed to be invaded. And I've read and assessed the evidence that contradicts those claims. The skeptics win that one. They're aren't doing sad-assed dissembling and claims that vanish when examined, like the one about Saddam's "cadre of about 10,000 nuclear engineers."
Book recommendation: Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, by John Nixon
Nicely argued. I'm so tired of these FUDsters!
You should enlist in the Ukrianian foreign legion. The world could use more shish kebobs.
Americans opposing R's invasion of U is fine. This piece is in response to the mass freak-out over Chomsky saying we shouldn't shovel guns to U because U is going to lose eventually without USA joining in, and we don't want to do that bc we don't want to go to war with Russia. People can disagree with his assessment that U is going to lose unless we jump in (I personally think NC is right, but that's beside the point), but that's not what they're doing.
Chomsky isn't even against giving weapons to Ukraine, as he's made clear in other interviews. (Notably https://theintercept.com/2022/04/14/russia-ukraine-noam-chomsky-jeremy-scahill/ which I think is a vastly superior interview than the one in Current Affairs.)
His argument is that while yes, we should support Ukraine, eventually the war will end when Ukraine "is destroyed", Russia "is destroyed", or a negotiated settlement is reached. Since he doesn't believe this war will end in Russia being destroyed, and he doesn't want it to end with Ukraine being destroyed, he supports a negotiated settlement which....
....is honestly what everyone else thinks too, although the devil is in the details. (Ukraine and Russia would no doubt both love a negotiated settlement now, but they obviously wouldn't agree on the terms.)
I think valid criticism of Chomsky is that:
1) He may be seriously overestimating Russia's ability to continue this fight indefinitely. He says the Russians "will not be destroyed", which in his framework means they can't lose, and thus will either win or draw but...logistics is a thing. You don't need to destroy all the tanks a country has, just the ones they can manage to get into the war zone. Or keep fuelled.
2) Which brings us to the larger problem; he's glossing over the differences between a side being "destroyed", being rendered unable to effectively fight, and losing the will to fight. In his framework, there's no room for "they could keep fighting, but mounting casualties have led to domestic political pressure to unilaterally withdraw". An attempt may well be made by Russia to push the borders in the Donbas forward incrementally, dig in, and declare "victory", not because they have been "destroyed", but because they are unwilling to continue fighting. Historically, wars have ended like that, and while Chomsky says there's no "third way" to end a war, that's not either of the two ways he lists.
3) More broadly he's ignoring the possibility of stalemate that lasts long enough it becomes the status quo. But lots of wars end like that! For example, the Korean War. However imperfect the armistice may have been, South Korea is a future that Ukraine would dearly love to achieve.
My personal view is that the Current Affairs interview is just a bad interview, that it gave many people a misleading view of what Chomsky thinks, and it's triggering a lot of angry take-downs of a straw man. Whereas what Chomsky actually seems to think is that we should continue giving Ukraine weapons, we should avoid triggering WWIII, and we should be trying to engineer a negotiated settlement that both sides can live with and which will lead to a lasting peace.
And that is very reasonable! It seems likely now that the war will end with Russia controlling Crimea and Ukraine controlling the vast majority of land outside it. The remaining questions are around the status of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and a land bridge to Crimea. Supporting Ukraine until Russia agrees on a ceasefire that leaves the breakaway republics with their pre-war borders in exchange for international recognition of the annexation of Crimea is not an absurd outcome to hope for at this point, perhaps combined with some fig leaves around renaming a few Ukrainian streets, recognising Russian as an official language, and officially accepting that Ukraine will not join NATO (but can join other alliances).
Yes
There's no anti-war left. Or right. There's a tiny anti-war-from-principle group and the rest are opportunists who pretend to be anti-war because whichever political group they hate is out front pushing the war.
Agreed - it seems to be much more about wars we don't like vs. ones we do: which ones are a symbol of our morality vs. which ones are a symbol of our immorality (however one's tribe defines "morality").
I think it's a much less complicated Team Red vs. Team Blue, but then I'm cynical about this subject.
Pretty sure the moment the American anti-war left died by CooCoo’s-Nest-style pillow-suffocation was when Obama was elected as an anti-Bush candidate only to continue many of the same policies.
I totally get what FdB says about the 9/11 moment comparisons. There was, like, 10 minutes of warm national unity before you realized you were passively unzipping for the war orgy just to show you didn’t hate America. It feels that way now about the trajectory of the Ukraine conversation.
This comment describes the social posturing well
Most of the anti-war left was just the contrarian-left wearing an anti-war mask, because anti-war-left is a more convenient moral high-ground than merely contrarian-left.
What people don't realize about Ghandi, is Ghandi wasn't anti-violence, Ghandi was anti-loss, and correctly saw that violence against the British Army wasn't a path to victory.
Anti-war is the cloak you wear when your side is vastly outgunned.
What has the US successfully achieved with its wars in the last 50 years?
We held back the Communist killing fields in Southeast Asia. Eventually we lost resolve and they happened anyway.
We stopped the Communist Killing fields in the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel. We've held this line for 60+ years.
We held together the middle east.
We stopped Cuban backed Communist killing fields in Central America
We stopped ethnic cleansing in Southeastern Europe
We held the Communists back at Eastern Europe
We took out Saddam. Remember, this is a guy who boasted funding suicide bombers around the world. Saddam went on TV and praised the killer, boastfully provided lavish cash rewards to the killer's family. Saddam employed a Nuclear Mujahedeen of 10,000 engineers and technicians tasked with building nuclear weapons. Saddam fired chemical weapons at our allies in the middle east. Saddam attacked people we vowed to defend as part of nuclear non-proliferation. Saddam sent assassins to kill former President Jimmy Carter. We made the fatal mistake of thinking the Iraqi people wished to live under a secular democracy. The people of Iraq wish to live under a authoritarian theocracy.
We took out Kaddafi, people forget Kaddafi spread terror. Kaddafi spread terror amongst his neighbors, and terrorized the Mediterranean. Kaddafi bombed civilian airliners in Europe.
It can end when peace is negotiated with Putin's successor. Don't forget that Putin is a dictator, his interests are not the same as the interests of Russia or Russians.
I don't think it is unfashionable to think a negotiated settlement will be the end? Negotiations have been ongoing for literally the entire conflict (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_peace_negotiations). And, as noted, there's not really an alternative.
The question is, what should the terms be and how involved should the US be? Now, there's a real problem of coordination here as some of what Putin wants the US/EU can't give him (Ukrainian concessions) and some of what he wants Ukraine can't give him (relief from sanctions). Presumably there's some back door conversations going on, but if not, that is admittedly bad and a problem.
But more broadly, there's a tendency to take political statements made by western politicians to 'domestic' audiences as sacrosanct declarations of policy and Putin's political statements as...political statements for domestic consumption. Which is pretty silly.
Fair points. By unfashionable I meant socially & media-wise
what do you think Ukraine should concede in this negotiation?
Well, you know, silence is violence.
IOW, I think this is just an extension of the larger political mood that fighting for social justice/your rights as an American primarily entails loudly criticizing the people you disagree with. Ukraine-related matters are just some low-hanging fruit where you can do something righteous by “speaking out.”
I’ll take needless contrarianism for $1000, Alex.
I think there is certainly a place for that. But it’s not healthy to define oneself as a contrarian and object to things only to feed your inner contrarian.
Your comment suggests that I'm not sincere in the things I've said. But I am in fact entirely sincere.
I think you’re sincere in your reflexive contrarianism, sure. Sometimes it produces great insights and other times…not so much.
I think complex issues of war and peace are the very hardest to figure out, so it's surprising to me that you think the only reason someone might diverge from the consensus is contrarianism.
Am I wrong that everyone being on board with something gives you the willies?
Dissent often equals contrarianism.
The most classic case being the hipster who stops liking a band once it becomes poplar. Some people really get off on that kind of shit.
Probably wrong to think that's relevant
I think the point is that NOT everyone is on board, but on social media that’s apparently not an opinion we are allowed to have.
I actually agree with Freddie on the point of censorship. Although clearly propaganda outlets like RT might be in a grey zone. But basically, yes, we need to hear the Freedie's, Chomsky's and Glenn Greenwalds.
Everyone being on board with a reality that is extremely complicated and multifaceted _should_ give any thinking person the willies. That’s practically the point.
A war is never as simple as Good Guys v Bad Guys or “my country right or wrong.”
What is needless or contrarian about having the view that America should not engage in a war half the world away?
War: bad
More war: also bad
Letting a psychopath run over weaker neighbors, raping pillaging and plundering is also bad.
Putin apparently wants to wipe the earth clean of Ukrainians, doesn't this carry even the faint scent of badness that we had to stamp out 80 years ago?
What does the end game of allowing Putin to build a network look like?
You seem to have utter faith that the messaging we're getting and the reporting we're being subjected to is unimpeachable -- all of it white hot, unexamined, stripped of context, and led by those totally trustworthy cheerleaders-with-a-perfect-record, the neocons.
Yes, I have my doubts. But the overall picture is of Putin threatening every one of his neighbors, several excursions into CIS nations, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine on multiple occasions, poisoning dissidents ... did you somehow forget Putin was part of the KGB, and a self described hooligan ... those aren't the credentials of a decent man.
Is the argument really about Putin's decency? I doubt anyone among the dissident/contrarian voices is making a case for the man's essential goodness. Hooligan, criminal, autocrat-- call him what you will: Why is the war always all about Putin? Is he so all-powerful that he can do whatever he wishes with Russia's military, its resources, its people? I've been frankly puzzled by the (especially leftist) strain in American thinking that grants Putin a kind of eerie omnipotence -- he manipulates Trump, fiddles with our elections, launches cyber attacks at will. He's like a James Bond villain. Has anyone considered the possibility that it's really Putin who's behind global warming?
I'm not the first, even in these comments, to suggest that we've lost our collective mind. We jump from one hysterical bandwagon to the next -- Ukraine is the latest global mental breakdown. The problem is that, unlike the other breakdowns we had, this one involves nukes.
Does Putin manipulate Trump, or does Trump manipulate Putin? Now that is the question. Trump, a recognized hard-ass who cuts resort deals and pageant deals all around the world didn't knuckle under to Putin on a resort in Russia.
So, just whom is the master deal-cutter, Trump or Putin?
Apparently, with willing abettors of the American Media, Putin was able to manipulate the news cycle for 4 years. Hunter Biden is on record saying the real Putin kompromat tape is of him.
You can take a man out of the KGB, but you can't take the KGB out of the man.
This is completely meaningless. For the war in Ukraine there are many, many specific issues that have been introduced as arguments against escalation by the West.
1. Russia's nuclear arsenal
2. The economic impact on the world
3. The implausibility of deterring Russia from a region which they have historically held as a vital national interest
In response to those specific points what do you have to offer? What is essentially an ad hominem attack--the only reason anyone could have for dissent is contrarianism.
I wasn’t talking about anyone, I was talking about Freddie.
You're still attacking him and not his argument, which he laid out in detail. Attacking the messenger says to me that you probably can't attack the message.
Since I’ve discussed things with you before - I’ll stop talking to you now. These discussion aren’t productive.
In other words you've lost the argument and are headed for the door.
Excellent, reasoned, restrained (by which I mean logical) analysis. The level of hysteria, the pumped-up macho Russia-bashing, the refusal to see Putin as anyone other than Sauron is terrifying, and the swift, furious, and almost universal *moral* condemnation of anyone who dissents smacks of nothing so much as "splitting" (in psychological terms.) It's as though the Western world is suddenly suffering from a severe case of borderline personality disorder. Of course, many of the loudest screamers have already cut their teeth on earlier bouts of cancel culture, so they're getting better and better at it.
I have been in favor of arming Ukraine. But I admit that as this drags on, and the body count grows, I wonder if we should have just let Russia take it.
We watch international news every night, and after a quick “This report contains upsetting images” they show what’s happening. The bodies, the sobbing mothers, the disfigured and traumatized kids.
I keep coming back to this: If I had to choose between Putin ruling America and my son’s life, I’d choose my son in a second. Maybe that’s wrong but it’s true.
There are no good choices, but I wonder if people would be better off at home with their families, under an awful occupation, than losing their homes and spouses and kids in this carnage. I really don’t know anymore.
What makes you think the killing and rape and torture stop under occupation?
Seriously? Because once the shooting stop the conqueror typically is concerned with re-establishing civil order.
Since their initial plan failed, they've been bombing cities and civilians for weeks. I believe that under occupation fewer civilians would be killed. Obviously I don't like either option, but if our current foreign policy = a higher total body count, isn't that something to consider?
I don't think Russian control of Ukraine would end the violence, it could just lead to an endless counter insurgency similar to our adventures in the Middle East.
I find it hard to have any strong opinions on thus conflict because it involves so many layers of things that are hard to understand and predict. Think of how much you've heard thus far has turned out to be completely wrong.
How does your theory play out in reality? Any talented sociopath in power then gets to rule the world as he would gladly give the lives of millions, including members of his own family, for his own glory.
There was a Cold War from 1950-1990. And yet the scenario you are describing never came to pass.
is that the choice on offer?
Apparently Putin isn't just after the land, he's out to exterminate every Ukrainian.
Which leads back to the basic premise of not bowing down to oppressors, they're never satisfied.
Are you serious? He's out to "exterminate" every Ukrainian? Excuse me, but that's either ridiculously hyperbolic or demented. Putin wants the Donbas. And he doesn't want NATO on his border.
I think Putin would happily murder every single Ukrainian, if that's what he had to do to assert Russian control over Ukraine. He is a product of the Soviet Union, the same Soviet Union that deliberately starved Ukraine and then sent Russians to repopulate it.
Putin is not Stalin and contemporary Ukrainians are not kulaks. Get a grip.
Well no, of course he isn't, but there is tons of writing out there that clearly identifies Putin's belief system at root being the worst parts of Soviet imperialism whitewashed over with Russian nationalism.
According to Russian state media, Putin's plan is to systematically destroy Ukrainian culture through violent mass repressions, lasting decades. The end goal is to destroy the independent Ukrainian state in such a way that it would never be able to recover.
Source (in Russian): https://web.archive.org/web/20220403223221/https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html
Wikipedia article in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_should_do_with_Ukraine
People like Noah Smith (and basically every “center-left” pundit from Jonathan Chait on down) are a mystery to me. Broadly, most of the shit they believe is gospel in the institutions they move in. They’ve won for the most part. And what do they spend their time doing? Punching what remains of the American left—who is nowhere near the levers of power—because of something they read online. “Hmm yes this is pretty troubling,” they say, scratching their chins, and then shit out another piece of hectoring pablum. A bunch of people whose entire politics can be summed up as trying to be the serious adult in the room, but without any of the discernment or insight an actual adult would have.
I'll be the annoying guy who again stresses that America's great sin is that we never had a reckoning over the Iraq War. If every last pundit who rallied support for it was treated as the pariah they should be then perhaps we would've had some examples that being the adult in the room should require some level of discernment, wisdom, or accountability.
Let us make a collective bargain that we will find, prosecute, and punish every Russian war criminal, the day after we finish doing the same to the American war criminals.
The Pope came under fire in the public discourse this past week for arranging for a Ukrainian and a Russian woman - coworkers at a hospital - to carry the cross for one leg of the Good Friday procession. The idea was that it sent a bad message, that it was “both-sidesing” the conflict somehow.
We’re in a strange, creepy place when it’s considered a moral betrayal for the Pope to publicly state support for international cooperation and reconciliation between the citizens of warring countries. Everybody loves it when he says he doesn’t have the moral authority to judge gay people, when he washes the feet of prisoners, and when he condemns international conflict. Just not *this* international conflict, somehow.
Thanks for this post. It’s a relief to hear someone talking about how strange and uncritical the discourse has gotten.
...Also, when I say “the discourse,” I’m talking about mainstream news. I take in very little commentary on the Ukraine war and have no sense at all what the conversation is like on social media. I’ve found the fevered excitement for the war unpleasant enough - and honestly, the situation so changeable and the atrocities so hard to look at - that I try as much as possible to just stay up on broad events and not get too deep in the weeds day-to-day.
The mainstream journalism is so emotional, so credulous, it’s also sometimes hard to read. I feel for the people seeing atrocities on the ground and trying to write about them, but the narrative permitted into the actual papers is so thoroughly in lockstep, so obvious in what kinds of facts it will and will not present for public consideration. It’s not that I believe they’re hiding some reason for Russian sympathy from me - it’s that anything that produces this level of chanting-in-unison coverage makes me suspicious regardless of what it is or how much I agree with it.
I keep asking myself, what am I missing here. From this whole big picture. There must be larger works which we don't see.
You're describing exactly the feeling I had with the 2020 election, but applied to a different story. I totally lost faith in mainstream media.
That's mostly my take, too. I don't really know much about the commentariat discourse. I'm basically mostly hoping for no nuclear war. My hope sounds more than a little callous, because real people are now dying whether there's a nuclear war or not. (And while my sympathies are much more with Ukraine than Russia, I count the Russian soldiers dying as "real people," too. Their deaths are part of the overall loss.)
The whole thing reminds me of the US entry into WWI, a war which Americans had little real benefit from and therefore dissent had to be ruthlessly suppressed, lest people start to get ideas.
Like the war in Ukraine, there was no shortage of atrocity propaganda to keep people in line. While Wilhelmine Germany was not exactly modern-day Sweden, the atrocity tales mostly turned out to be either wild exaggerations, or invented out of whole cloth. (Interesting, the place where the Germans and their allies really did behave as badly as allied propaganda would have it was Serbia, but Serbs weren't the right kind of victims, so little was made of this.)
For that matter, the British and their allies were also not nearly as pristine as the press releases would have had it.
Isn't this how the glorious wars always go, though? There's no room for nuance when you're trying to convince people to die.
"including Chomsky, other left critics of prolonging the war, and me"
Ah, there it is. The framing that is the root of the problem. "Prolonging" a war by assisting the defenders.
"It is nonsensical to claim that an American has no right to an opinion on conduct by America’s government."
Who is claiming this? Chomsky et al are being attacked for believing the Ukrainian must simply bow before either Russian aggression or U.S. demands.
"Russia possesses a large and advanced military"
And every Javelin we or our allies provides chips away at this a bit more.
"I think that living as part of the hegemon has led many Americans to chafe at the idea that there are any obstacles to implementing their will at all, that the world is an entirely pliable entity that will bend to our preferences if we just want it enough."
Do you realize the irony of this line when people like Smith are saying "we should help Ukraine but not dictate to Ukraine" and people like Chomsky are saying "we should dictate to Ukraine the terms of their surrender"?
If this bogs down to a stalemate then that's also quite horrible for Russia, who ultimately has the ability to stop their aggression at any time. The Ukrainians have to concede to an aggressor or fight until the aggressor decides it's no longer worth it. The US and the international community have to decide how to support Ukraine such that Russia very much regrets its decision to invade so as to both help Ukraine and deter future such actions.
For someone with a worldview so strongly based on power differentials that need rectifying, it's odd you seem to evaluate this conflict as if "well life is unfair sometimes" is the end of the story.
Smith, in the section I quoted, literally says Chomsky has zero right to say what should happen next. And this echoes the demands of Ukrainians in the media: we demand American help, and it's none of America's business! Sorry. That's not how democracy works.
1. I can grant you Smith is being hyperbolic at best with his 0% and 100% framing. The U.S. and the international community have some sway here, and if Ukraine were to act irresponsibly in some way then external pressure to change would be warranted.
(I also think Smith is wrong that, but for U.S. support, Ukraine would have already lost. The U.S. was not the only supplier of arms and the Ukrainians have demonstrated a will to fight to the bitter end multiple times.)
2. However, I don't think you're correctly interpreting what Smith said. Nowhere did Smith say an American has no right to question America's involvement in this, or any international issue as a free speech or democracy issue. Smith is criticizing that Chomsky et al believe the U.S. even can simply dictate that Ukraine cease hostilities under terms the U.S. deems appropriate.
In short, I think you're overextending the criticism Smith made to make his side seem less rational as part of your at-least-partially-justifiable concern over less-than-rational-groupthink leading us astray. Instead of Smith criticizing Chomsky for saying the Ukrainians don't have the right to decide Ukraine's fate, you've flipped this to criticizing Smith for denying Chomsky has a right to an opinion about the U.S. involvement (which I maintain was never what Smith said).
And just what would Russian victory look like ten years down the road? Would Russia be a more free and open society? Would Odessa be a welcoming city for western investment or tourism?
NO. Russia would be even more of an armed camp, Eastern Europe and Black Sea states would be trembling armed camps suspicious of any visitor.
Bold of you to assume it’s a Russian “victory” in 10 years given how things have gone thus far.
All wars are wars of attrition, Russia has a whole lot more resources than Ukraine. The lessons from The Art Of War lend strength to Russian victory.
But let's say there's a negotiated peace. What does that look like? Russia may have lost face, lost a lot of men, and even equipment. But look at how devastated Ukraine is. Every city has been reduced to junk, practically none of the apartment buildings are salvageable public works are destroyed. Just like post war Europe, most of Ukraine will take 30 years to rebuild. Even England still has abandoned cities never rebuilt from WWII.
Every city is reduced to junk? Did you see Zelinski waking around with Boris Johnson? Did you see any damage?
The media correctly focuses on what’s been damaged not what’s undamaged. It’s important to keep that in mind
Mariupol not ring a bell?
The Russians are attack in the south and east. Kiev is in the north. The question is what Kherson and Kharkiv look like in the coming months and what Kiev looks like in a couple of years.
It's not a question of who runs out of resources first.
It's a question of how many resources the Russians are willing to lose before they think it's not worth continuing to conquer Ukraine.
Thus far, the Russians have taken heavy losses, which were not sustainable. Hence they withdrew from the Kyiv area to refit and reposition in the east, where it remains to be seen how the fighting will go in the second stage of the war.
Ukraine has been moving around in technicals. Russia is moving around in BTRs and tanks. There are warnings that the Ukrainians are running out of ammo; the west is pumping resources in to help Ukraine, and the main thing we see out of that is Chechen selfies with captured weapons. Russia just hit Lvov/Lviv again. A thousand soldiers surrendering all at once in Mariupol. Etc., etc. But according to western experts, this is somehow a close fight!
Doesn't matter what Ukraine drives around in so long as they can shoot missiles at Russian tanks and aircraft.
The main thing we see out of Western assistance is a bunch of destroyed Russian armor forcing the Russians to withdraw from the Kyiv region and reconsider their strategy.
Most Western experts initially overestimated Russian competence and underestimated Ukraine's. At this point if you think this war is going well for Russia you're willfully deluded. They still might be able to pull out a limited victory in the East, but it came at a far, far higher price than they wanted.
It's not what they're driving around in, it's the fact that they went to having very many armored vehicles to having very few and being forced to drive around in civilian vehicles. So I think if you look a little deeper you'll see that they're not really driving around shooting missiles and tanks and airplanes.
Mostly they're holding fortified positions and hoping for resupply. Which may not be coming, unfortunately, because the Russians have been hitting their fuel depots.
But fine, let's say you're right: why haven't we seen more of Ukrainian victories? The media's on their side, the Ukrainians love to record and spread everything, even the stuff they should probably keep private. Where are all the Russian losses? Even that recent story about Ukrainians calling Russian mothers up mentioned like 600 Russian casualties. Oryx has a bunch of tanks up as Russian losses, but based purely on the photos, most captures and losses are unverified.
People expect a swift victory from Russia, and other than the very very start of the war, there's no indication that Russia's in a hurry, other than wishful thinking on our part for the war to be over.
First off, the vast majority of the missiles we're giving them are shot by people on the ground, not driving or flying about. Maybe jot that down.
In your strange world where Russia isn't doing poorly, why did they withdraw from the north? Was that not a massive Ukrainian victory?
"There's no indication Russia's in a hurry"
1. We have documented Russian war plans and expectations for how they thought the war was going to go.
2. We saw them do things one does--like overextending airborne troops into Kyiv--when one is trying to quickly seize key objectives far behind enemy lines.
I fear you are legitimately retarded if at this point in the war with all of the available evidence that you think Russia has done just fine. There are Russian nationalists calling for Putin to either quit the war or actually wage war! They are unable to consider Russia has been trying they just suck, but even they can admit things aren't going well!
If you invade a country and hold their territory and they can't kick you out then how is that not winning? There is a move afoot to redefine military victory down to put lipstick on the Ukrainian pig.
Surely you've heard of a pyrrhic victory before
How does that come even close to describing what's happening here? Unless you're discussing the unintended blowback of all those sanctions on the global economy and US inflation.
It's both. Russia's military is getting wrecked, as is its economy.
Putin thought this would be a quick cakewalk and instead it's been a fiasco thus far.
Maybe the Russian military can turn this around and their economy will prove resilient, but the opening phase was a debacle.
You are mistaken as tot he direction that the goalposts are moving.
The initial plan was a lightning attack on Kyiv down the NW axis and the Sumy axis, and a double pincer through Kharkiv and Mykolaiv to encircle the main Ukrainian army. They take the Capitol immediately, cut off the military from the pro-West base in the west, denazify anyone on the list in the mobile crematoriums, and declare Ukraine reunited with the Motherland at last in a victory speech in Maidan Square.
From the battle plans we plainly observed, and from the rhetoric Russia used before and after the invasion, this is what victory was supposed to look like.
But all attacks *everywhere* bogged down and what was supposed to be quick, clean, and easy turned into a stymied bloodbath. The only place where Russians really *moved* as intended was south, roundabouts Kherson on the Mykolaiv front.
So now they’re scaling back objectives and focusing on the south and the east, trying to carve out as much occupied territory as possible- quite a step down from owning the place outright!
Russia is hitting their targets in the same way that somebody shooting a piece of paper and then using a marker to color around the bullet holes is hitting their bulls-eye.
This is all separate from the fact the Russia has already paid a higher price in material, lives, capital, and international standing than a military victory could ever pay for, not even counting how much more they need to pay to even *get* said victory. A counterfactual Russia that had decided to reverse its build up in December and stay chill would be far better off than a Russia that might finally conquer everything east of the Dnieper by paying 30,000 corpses and 90,000 wounded and a thousand tanks and so on and so forth.
The Russians split their forces up along a bunch of different advances, to the point where any single battle group was too small to make much headway against determined opposition. Think about this: each advance had its own commanding officer. There was no single individual in charge of the whole operation. Any coordination between advancing groups was coincidental.
The obvious question is what would anybody violate standard military doctrine in this fashion? It is stunningly incompetent. The answer is that the Russians weren't expecting the Ukrainians to fight back. Splitting your forces up makes a lot of sense if you think that all you need to do is roll into a city and as a result the enemy will just lay down their arms.
Of course that's not what happened. The point that we should take away is that yes, the Ukrainians are brave and determined, but a lot of the Russian's wounds were self inflicted. What happened after Putin figured out the Ukrainians weren't pushovers? He sacked a bunch of Russia's intelligence community and he put his favorite general in charge of the entire operation. Now the Russians are doing what they should have done in the first place, which is mass all of their forces into one front to attack the eastern portion of Ukraine.
The war this month is not the war from February and March. The tactics have shifted and the enemy has made an adjustment. I predicted way back when this whole thing blew up that the Russians would resort to bombarding and depopulating cities just as they did in Grozny and Aleppo.
Thanks for this Freddie.
Noah Smith wrote a post on April 11th arguing that in the midterms Democrats should "run on the war," since it's so popular. I find that type of thinking to be abhorrent.
In the Haggadah we use for Passover, there's a memorable line. The Egyptian soldiers are drowning in the Red Sea, the angels in Heaven rejoice by singing and God admonishes, "Why are you celebrating when my creatures are perishing?"
In my opinion, there is nothing to celebrate about this war. And I wish American policy was to advocate for any peace deal that both Ukraine and Russia would accept even if it means a complete rollback of sanctions. I've been labeled a Putin supporter for this POV.
Unfortunately that's just politics, which I find abhorrent generally.
Not only is it abhorent, it also won't work.
“I think most people in 2022 are profoundly disillusioned, in politics yes but also in a broader overriding sense, and feel beset by convincing critiques of every idea, party, movement, and institution in American life.”
Man, what a great way to put it. I occasionally think about how deflating it can be that the internet is full of critiques (often quite good!) about anything and everything you could possibly like. Everything from your favorite band or movie to an institution you’re part of or attached has been eviscerated at some point. I hadn’t really considered how that sense of disillusionment manifests itself in a society or what it leads to, but I certainly am now. As always, appreciate your writing.