Boy,
what a boring-sounding title. If I were a reader of my own blog and
came across this, I might be tempted to skip it, but let me see if I
can make it a bit less weighty-sounding and try to relate it to the
blog post I wrote recently, regarding “World War II – Was It the
Last Good War?”
In
response to my Twitter buddy, Jason Linkins who writes political
op-ed for HuffPo and does it very well, he is absolutely thrilled
that we are once again being given the opportunity to hop back into a
quagmire and protect the political aspirations of a bunch of affluent
politicians, I can't say he's wrong at all. Thirteen years after
9/11, we've done. . . what? Killed Osama bin Laden, sure. But we've
managed to destabilize an entire region, which we seem to be
immensely terrific at doing (see Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) in the mid
to latter part of the 20th century.
So,
Dubya got a hair up his ass, after 19 terrorists from Saudi Arabia,
backed by money provided by al-Qaeda (suspiciously close to the Saud
family, who were hand-holding with the Bush family, in case anyone
forgot) bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (although I
wonder about that) and went tearing into. . . Iraq? Only after
we had staged a semi-invasion of Afghanistan, and that was always
kind of iffy to me, because Afghanistan is known as bein' the
“Graveyard of Empires” and all. I'm still trying to connect the
dots. When Dubya made his brave assertion “Mission Accomplished”
just what in the Hell was he referring to? We never really managed to
“quell” the “dissidents” in either Afghanistan or Iraq, a
fact that can still be measured in body counts and terrible stories
of atrocities, coming out of, now, specifically, Iraq, and of all
places Syria, which has it's very own home-grown Strong Man in place,
the son of the late President Assad.
In all
honesty, I don't know if this is a good thing, or bad. I also don't
know if it's a good idea for President Obama to sit down and treat
with this man, seeing as how he's got lots of his own countrymen's
blood on his hands. At least, Obama isn't sitting down with al-Qaeda,
which was the worst idea I ever heard, since I said “yes” to Bill
Nunnally. You DO NOT treat with terrorists. Terrorists are not
countries; they are not sovereign entities; they are not realms or
Kingdoms. They are a bunch of zealots with nothing in their
jackalheads except creating terror in the hearts and minds of the
people around them to further their cause, which is usually couched
in some amorphous language and difficult to attain, even with more
measured people and responses. They have no mission statements; they
have no credo, other than “Death to the Infidel” and are
sectarian in the extreme; they will kill members of their own “faith”
quicker than Christians and Jews, because those Sunnis were closer to
Allah and should have understood that they were committing heresies.
I liken them to the IRA at its worst. The Crusades sound more
moderate, when you remember that the Christians who lived there,
routinely met and worked with the other faiths in the Middle East.
And now,
we come to this: I TOLD YOU SO. Russia. Last week, I implied that
basically, the whole mish-mash between Russia and Ukraine should be
left alone. They've squabbled and gone back and forth for centuries.
They are two countries, who, while not having a lot in common, bear a
very similar culture and a shared history; at times amicable, at
times, downright horrible. Stalin went out of his way to starve the
Kulaks, the rich Ukrainian farmers in 1934, and several million
people starved to death. It has been referred to as “Harvest of
Sorrow” and a fine historical book of the same name, written by
Robert Conquest, depicts the horror and devastation wrought upon the
Kulaks. But, again, this was not the first time Ukraine and Russia
had adversarial dealings with one another and would not be the last.
Again,
there are many ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, just as there are
many ethnic Ukrainians who live in western Russia and Belarus. The
ENTIRE region has seen many different rulers, from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, to the Czarist rulers.
It really is no wonder that one day, Ukrainians want one thing, and
another day, they wish for something else. There is a kind of
schizophrenic zeitgeist that exists in this entire region and when
you look at the maps and how the empires overlaid one another, it is
easy to understand why.
courtesy of: deviantart.com
The
writer P. J. O'Rourke once went to Eastern Europe and Russia when the
Iron Curtain first fell, and the salient point he took away from his
experiences there, aside from all of the horrible automobiles looking
like they had been made by the Dinky Toy Company, was the complete
and utter confusion that the new “nation-states” wanted and why
they wanted it. “We want Democracy!”, some shouted on one day.
When asked why, they yelled, “Because, Democracy is good!”
without having clue one what it was all about.
courtesy of: allaboutturkey.com
Later
on, during the same trip, P. J. asked some of the same people what
they wanted. “We wish to stay with the Motherland!”, they
shouted. When asked why, they hollered, “Because she takes care of
us?”, although many were not sure this was true. This was over
twenty years ago, and it is still pertinent today. If you look at the
maps, you see that some of the western parts of Ukraine were in the
Austro-Hungarian sphere, the southern parts in the Ottoman Empire,
and the Eastern portion were part of the Russian Empire. Divestiture
came in 1914, but in 1917, the Russian Revolution took place and the
Communists were firmly in power, after fighting a civil war against
the Royalists. After World War II, as part of the agreement at Yalta,
Russia retained Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the other “buffer”
states, as there were already ethnic Russians living in these places,
and because Stalin was a murderous, land-grabbing rat-bastard.
Regardless, I believe that, if by some miracle the Romanovs had
remained in power, and they were somehow, by another miracle,
able to best the Nazis, they would have demanded Ukraine and Belarus
and all the rest as their spoils of war. This is a Russian thing; NOT
a Soviet thing.
Again,
it speaks to the peculiar phobia that Russia harbors towards the West
and we help no one by meddling in this. To top it off, today's
headline in “The World” is this:
courtesy of: HuffPo
I TOLD YOU SO!
Followed
by this article:
courtesy of: HuffPo
I
mentioned last week that the situation between Russia and Ukraine
will find it's own solution. That may sound like weak sauce, but what
I mean is they are better left to their own devices, especially since
the west and most particularly the United States has such a horrible
track record when it comes to intercession. People can quote Panama
and Grenada all they want, but the simple fact is, we invaded weak
3rd world countries, one in an attempt to divert a
horrendous foreign policy decision on our part, when we were involved
in Lebanon, in 1983.
Let's play a "what if" scenario and see if this doesn't make a bit more sense. Suppose the United States was having some kind of squabble with Mexico, over god-knows-what. Water rights, illegal immigration, the number of donkeys displayed in crappy mariachi bands north of the border was in dispute, whatever, and things got heated. Maybe we have some troops lined up along the borders, ostensibly to keep out "undesirables". We've had our issues with Mexico in the past, but we've always managed to get them straightened out. But this time, we're dragging it along, and for some reason, both sides are being belligerent. On the outside, the rest of the world is throwing their two cents in about what a bunch of imperialist dogs the United States is, and we should never have left Merry Olde England. Yada, yada. After several weeks of this, with tensions ebbing and flowing, things get kind of mind-numbing, what with all of the other stuff going on. Then, out of the blue, or not-so, England is invaded by France and Belgium, and some not-so-nice things begin to happen. Do you honestly think that for one minute, the United States isn't going to have something to say, or do something about that situation, to mitigate and save their long-time ally? The same case can be made for Russia as regards Syria, I refuse to say "vis a vis" because it's pretentious, and I realize I am kind of shoe-horning some facts in here and making it a bit ridiculous, but it's for a reason.
The Russian-Ukrainian relationship is a very special one; much like ours is with Great Britain. Why? Because, history.
I'm not
a historian, or a military historical buff, but I do understand long
arcs and how actions from the past resonate into the present. What we
do now will make a difference. It might be a decade, or it might be a
century. Wise men have the gift of being able to predict what our
actions now will predicate for our future. I am not one of those, but
I'm a damned good observer and student of global hegemony. I truly
think that we should do nothing at all about the Russian-Ukraine
situation and tread very, very lightly with this mess in the Middle
East.
This isn't even a war movie. It's an exploration into the heart of darkness, based on a Joseph Conrad novel.
I know I
called for taking a stance last week, regarding ISIS or ISIL and they
are fearsome and what they are doing is beyond horrific. I cannot
imagine the charnel house over there, and the suffering of the people
who live there. I have friends in Tunisia and Morocco and Egypt and I
fear for them, but we did a terrible job in Iraq. We destabilized the
country; something we excel at, and upon our departure(?) we managed
to foist some mediocre bureaucrat upon the country, along with a
less-than-useful fighting force. This is nothing but Vietnam Redux.
Francis Ford Coppola did a much better job with “Apocalypse Now
Redux” and it still sucked. Watch the original. But, let's not
create our own “Iraq Redux”. That's nothing anybody wants to sit
through.
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