I keep saying I don’t want to analyze fast moving current events, but I can’t help it. Here are a few things I want to say. It’s March 5, 2022 as I write this.
First, Putin’s actions are deplorable and inexcusable in terms of the human suffering they are causing and in terms of the very real risk of nuclear war they entail. Nothing I say below changes this. To say any of the points below excuse Putin’s actions would be like Hitler saying “Stalin did it first”. (Stalin slaughtered millions of Ukrainians before Hitler slaughtered millions of Ukrainians and Poles, among many others. Tens of millions of wrongs obviously don’t make a right. They add up to pure and unfathomable evil. Putin is putting himself in this category although he is only slaughtering human beings by the hundreds or thousands so far. But we are one nuclear exchange away from a body count even Hitler and Stalin might not have been able to fathom.)
There is a lot of obvious propaganda coming from the Russian side. There are a lot of lies (many so obvious they are just dumb) posted on social media by random people for random reasons. But there is also obvious spin coming from the U.S. government, and our media and public is buying into it without question. You don’t have to support Putin to just be a little skeptical about what you are hearing and ask who you are hearing it from and what their motivations might be. We are hearing that the war is going unexpectedly badly for the Russians. We are hearing that Russian morale is low. We are hearing and seeing videos of ordinary people stopping tanks and standing up to soldiers. We are hearing that Russia has not established air superiority. We are hearing that Putin is irrational or mentally ill. There may be kernels of truth to any and all of this, but it is all coming from U.S. government/military/intelligence sources and being parroted uncritically by our media. Government officials at all levels are giving interviews with very similar talking points, suggesting to me that it is a coordinated intelligence effort. Major newsrooms are either in on the propaganda effort (as it is clear to me they were on the Iraq weapons of mass destruction debacle), or they just don’t have other sources of news so all they can do is repeat what they are hearing from the government and each other.
Take any article on the situation and replace Russia or Putin with the United States, then replace Ukraine with Iraq. The world could have justified imposing “crippling sanctions” on the U.S. for that illegal “war of choice”. They don’t do that because they don’t have the political, military, or financial power to get on the wrong side of the United States, and we abuse that power.
Russia clearly felt threatened by that U.S. war, and by the NATO wars on Libya and even going back to the 1990s NATO war on Serbia.. The Afghanistan war seemed like a justified defensive action at the time even though it seems pointless in retrospect, but it was in Russia’s backyard and they could easily feel threatened. The U.S. has intervened in Syria, brought former Soviet countries into NATO, and almost certainly interfered in Ukrainian elections. Again, try to put ourselves in their shoes and we would be outraged to find that Russia had interfered with a Canadian or Mexican election let alone formed a military alliance with those countries. And remember when they formed a military alliance with Cuba and a nuclear war almost happened? Even the 1991 Gulf War must have been threatening to Russia as it seemed so overwhelming and came at a time of Russian weakness. Looked at another way, that war seemed at the time like a case where a sovereign UN member state was invaded by its neighbor, and the world came together to make it clear that would not be tolerated. Maybe this should have been the principle ever since then, rather than expansion of a (perceived) aggressive alliance in Eastern Europe. (Sorry Taiwan, this doesn’t help you.)
Now add U.S. politicians openly calling for Putin’s assassination, and imagine how outraged we would be if that rhetoric were reversed. Add the CIA openly salivating over the idea of a prolonged insurgency. Don’t think about a repeat of the death squads that caused so many civilians in Iraq and throughout Latin America to be tortured and disappeared, as the U.S. embraced right-wing elements and looked the other way in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend mentality.
I won’t second guess our political and military leadership in their response to this acute crisis, although the idea of NATO countries openly leaving guns and tanks on the border of Ukraine and Poland seems like a serious escalation to me. I assume the U.S. and NATO are openly sharing intelligence and advising the Ukrainian military on maneuvers. What are the chances there are really no CIA paramilitary or U.S. special forces in Ukraine? At least no tactical nuclear weapons have been deployed that we know of, and no naval confrontations have occurred.
Once this crisis passes and the dust settles, assuming it eventually does, maybe a group of courageous politicians could get together and make a serious renewed effort at arms control and risk reduction. That would be the absolute best outcome we can hope for from this crisis.