It’s screamingly obvious to anyone save perhaps the most gullible in a present-day university history program, that attempting to research the events and conduct of a war – and figuring out what is happening while the war is still ongoing is an impossibility. Were the defenders of Snake Island all killed in a Russian barrage … or are they alive, and prisoners of war? Is the Russian advance going as clockwork towards their goals … or are they being turned back? Have Ukrainian fighter aircraft shot down a Russian transport aircraft? Successfully ambushed a Russian column on an unspecified mission here or there in the conflict zone? Who is coming out ahead, dead or alive, on the ground or in the struggle for the eyeballs and sympathies of the outside world, watching with unswerving attention? What are we being told, and what is there to gain from us believing it?
The grim truth is – really, we can’t really believe much of what we see or hear about the war in the Ukraine at present. No armchair generals at this group blog, merely a collection of somewhat well-informed amateur (and perhaps a sprinkling of professional) analysists trying to make sense of what we can see, dimly through the fog. Truth is a nugget of pure gold somewhere in that fog and dirt; finding it may be more a matter of pure luck.
Russia
This War Comes Already Pre-Nuked
So, the Biden (Mis) Administration, or whoever and whatever powers have the strings firmly attached to the puppet in the Oval Office seems determined to pick a fight and a war with Russia over the Ukraine. A fight in which most Americans might have some mild-to-moderate sympathies with the Ukrainians, as they were most viciously abused under Soviet rule, having the misfortune to be essentially the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and relatively unwilling to have their crops and livelihoods confiscated for the good of the Party of the Workers, and having in the interim since the fall of the Iron Curtain to have developed some pesky notions of a separate and rather rebellious national identity. The Ukraine, like Poland, is luckless geographically, in being the pathway of invading armies from either direction, so one can’t really blame them for being a little testy and proactive about another one.
But it’s not really our fight, and it seems to be one constructed in a Potemkin village fashion.
There was a story, most likely apocryphal regarding a proposed alliance sometime during the late 19th century, between (IIRC) Britain and France, likely against a bellicose Germany, wherein a high-level British diplomat and his equally high-level French counterpart began pounding out the details of the proposed military alliance. The British diplo asked his French counterpart; what would be the absolute minimum number of troops that Britain would contribute to the situation in an emergency in the case of German invasion. “Only one,” replied the French diplomat, “And we would make certain that he would be killed at once.”
That is what the Biden administration would like, apparently. They would like to be able to wave the bloody shirt, the blood-saturated BDU blouses of American military personnel as a cynical and calculated distraction from a year of epic fail.
Is the Biden regime creating a “Wag the Dog” scenario with Ukraine ?
There is considerable talk in the media right now about Russia and Ukraine. Russia has moved troops close to the Ukrainian border. The Biden regime, which has no interest in the US southern border, has expressed alarming determination to stop a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why are they so interested in a corrupt country that has no strategic importance to us ? Certainly the Biden family has profited from Ukraine. Hunter Biden, who seems to be the family bagman, was paid $50,000 a month by the Ukraine Burisma gas company.
It was in April 2014 that Hunter became a board member for Burisma with at least $50,000 per month compensation, and $83,000 by some accounts.
The board appointment for someone who had no experience in the energy industry or in Ukraine came just months after Hunter was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserves after testing positive for cocaine.
Burisma’s board chairman, Alan Apter, said, “This is totally based on merit.” Apter added: “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”
Recently, the president of Ukraine, in a phone call from Biden, is alleged to have told Biden to “calm down.” The transcript of the call has not been released.
Why the threats, including moving 8500 US troops to eastern Europe ? Back in the 1990s, there was a movie called “Wag the Dog.” The plot was “Shortly before an election, a spin-doctor and a Hollywood producer join efforts to fabricate a war in order to cover up a Presidential sex scandal.” Is that what is going on now ?
Thoughts from a Cosmonaut
Valentina Leonidovna Ponomaryova is a former Soviet cosmonaut: with a background in applied mathematics, she was selected in 1962 as a member of the first group of women cosmonauts. Never got to fly a mission, though–she’d been scheduled to fly on Vostok 6, following Valentina Tereshkova’s scheduled flight on Vostok 5, but “Ponomaryova did not respond with standard Soviet cliches in interviews and her feminism made the Soviet leadership uneasy” and the crew assignments were altered. She later worked in orbital mechanics.
Interesting interview with her here. Particularly interesting, IMO, are her thoughts about the respective roles of humans vs automated systems in spaceflight.
In the United States, spacecraft technology developed on the basis of aviation, and the respect for and trust in the pilot, characteristics of aviation, naturally transferred to spacecraft technology. In the Soviet Union, spacecraft technology was based on artillery and rocketry. Rocket scientists never dealt with “a human on board”; for them, the concept of automatic control was much easier to comprehend.
and
There is no doubt that, despite a large number of extraordinary and emergency situations, the Gemini and the Apollo programs were completed successfully because in the United States from the very beginning manned spacecraft were designed with orientation toward semi-automatic control systems in which the leading and decisive role was given to astronauts. The Gemini guidance system was already semi-automatic, and the Apollo guidance system was designed in such a way that one astronaut could perform all the operations necessary for the return from any point of the lunar orbit independently from information received from the Earth.
The opposites eventually met: semi-automatic systems constituted the “golden mean” that Soviet and American cosmonautics approached from two opposite directions: the Soviets coming from the automatic systems, and the Americans, one might say, from the manual ones.
Applicable to systems of many kinds in addition to spacecraft, I think, and many American organizations seem to be departing from the ‘golden mean’ in the direction of too much dependence on automated systems which are insufficiently understood and supervised.
The Politician as Bully
Peggy Noonan, in a WSJ column which is actually worthwhile (rare for her these days, IMO) writes about aspects of Andrew Cuomo’s behavior which she says demonstrate a deep weirdness:
The culture of his office was rife with fear and intimidation. A victim: “It was extremely toxic, extremely abusive. If you got yelled at in front of everyone, it wasn’t any special day. . . . It was controlled largely by his temper, and he was surrounded by people who enabled his behavior.” Everyone feared retaliation for speaking out, so they didn’t.
But there is deep weirdness beyond that. He ordered one aide to memorize the lyrics to “Danny Boy.” She testified he “would pop out” of his office and ask her to start singing. A footnote says it was not the only time the governor asked her to sing. The aide found herself writing to a former staffer, “He just asked me to sing Bohemian Rhapsody so. We aren’t far off from a bedtime story.” He asked her to do push-ups in front of him…
I was reminded of a passage in one of the Hornblower novels in which the protagonist, as a new midshipman, finds himself on a ship with a sickly and disconnected captain and a midshipmen’s mess ruled by a bully, Simpson.
Simpson had apparently always been an ingenious tyrant, but now, embittered and humiliated by his failure to pass his examination for his commission, he was a worse tyrant, and his ingenuity had multiplied itself. He may have been weak in mathematics, but he was diabolically clever at making other people’s lives a burden to them. As senior officer in the mess he had wide official powers; as a man with a blistering tongue and a morbid sense of mischief he would have been powerful anyway, even if the Justinian had possessed an alert and masterful first lieutenant to keep him in check while Mr. Clay was neither…
Significantly, it was not his ordinary exactions which roused the greatest resentment — his levying toll upon their sea chests for clean shirts for himself, his appropriation of the best cuts of the meat served, nor even his taking their coveted issues of spirits. These things could be excused as understandable, the sort of thing they would do themselves if they had the power. But he displayed a whimsical arbitrariness which reminded Hornblower, with his classical education, of the freaks of the Roman emperors. He forced Cleveland to shave the whiskers which were his inordinate pride; he imposed upon Hether the duty of waking up Mackenzie every half hour, day and night, so that neither of them was able to sleep — and there were toadies ready to tell him if Hether ever failed in his task.
Noonan:
Here’s my thought when I finished the report. As America becomes stranger and our culture becomes stranger, our politicians become stranger. As their power increases (I can close a whole state down; I can close a country!) so do the stakes.
As politicians gain more and more power…especially arbitrary power…the kind of people who become politicians changes. Francis Spufford, in his book Red Plenty, writes about those who sought and achieved power in the Soviet Union. He notes that: