You want to hear a harsh truth? The Ukraine is not a hill that I’m prepared to die on. Nor send my, or anyone else’s sons to die on.
And it’s absolutely not something I’m prepared to start WWIII over.
Because that’s exactly what the West is being badgered, hectored and bullied to do.
NATO’s refusal to give Ukraine no-fly protection from the continuing, indiscriminate and inhumane Russian attacks from the air is strategically weak and morally wrong.
That’s former Democrat vice-presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman, writing.
I recently wrote that the US strategy may be to lure Putin into a grinding, decade-long occupation of the Ukraine, to tie up Russia while the US deals with China. That may or may not still be a cold-blooded possibility, but the growing risk is that the increasingly hysterical propaganda campaign against Russia is getting out of hand, just as it did in that fateful July and August of 1914.
Let’s be clear: it’s not that I don’t feel any pity for the civilians caught up in the fighting. It’s certainly not that I support Vladimir Putin. But civilians have been dying in wars and skirmishes all over the world over even recent years: were newspapers shrieking for a no-fly-zone over the Yemen? Did anyone posture on social media that they “stand with Zaire”? Yet the latter — now dubbed Democratic Republic of the Congo — has been “every bit as bloody and contested as the Western Front in World War I”, according to no less a source than Britannica. Three million dead civilians and mass rape as a weapon of war: but do any of you even know what the colours of their flag are, so you can change your Twitter profile?
Let’s be brutally honest: there are some wars that we need to stay well out of. We’ve just blown 20 years of blood and treasure achieving absolutely bugger-all in Afghanistan. Are we really so stupid as to march other peoples’ sons and daughters off to do it all again, less than a year later?
Or worse?
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg have said they couldn’t support a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that would be an offensive action, and NATO is a defensive alliance. But that makes no sense. The offensive actions are being carried out by invading Russian troops. The purpose of a no-fly zone would be defensive, protecting and defending the people of Ukraine from the Russians.
This is a deceitful argument. It’s no better than Putin’s argument that he’s not invading, he’s sending peacekeepers. Indeed, at least Putin has the weak excuse that there is an ongoing civil conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk that’s cost thousands of civilian lives, amid horrific atrocities. So, Putin’s destroying the village in order to save it, I guess.
Because, call it “defensive” all you like, the instant NATO planes fire at Russian planes — that’s a war, buddy.
Lieberman’s appeal to historical example gets even worse.
There are moral reasons for the US and NATO to act that are rooted in our Good Samaritan laws and values. In the 1990s, Samantha Power, later the US envoy to the UN in the Obama administration, was so troubled by our slowness to intervene in the Balkans and Rwanda that she argued for a “responsibility to protect” citizens of other nations from genocide and other war crimes, which was unanimously adopted as an international norm by the UN World Summit in 2005.
The Australian
And how did that work out? “Responsibility to Protect” was explicitly cited as the justification for imposing a no-fly-zone over Libya. Which, lo and behold, turned into a full-scale war, spearheaded by NATO, that toppled the Gaddafi regime. Gaddafi was no more a model of democracy and peace than Putin, but how’s Libya doing, now that NATO has “liberated” it?
It’s a failed state where “the horrors facing civilians in Libya are routine and every day”. Those horrors include not just a Mad Max style anarchy of warring gangs and militias, but open slave markets.
Thanks, NATO and Responsibility to Protect!
But that’s not going to happen in the Ukraine, surely? I mean, it’s not as if the place is already a haven for militias of neo-Nazi thugs, or anything…
Finally, if you need any better reason to stay well clear of the Ukraine war, consider who is urging us to “stand with” it: Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, global corporations, Hollywood celebrities…
And, of course, Mark Zuckerberg.
Users of Facebook and Instagram in certain countries will be temporarily allowed to call for and threaten violence against Russian citizens and Russian troops, according to a new report […]
“The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland,” the report from Reuters says.
Breaking 911
Do we really need any more red flags that this is a fight we want to stay well out of? If you go talking about nuclear destruction, well, count me out.