Yeah, they’ve all gone nuts again. SAC has the world’s skies filled with its aircraft, bomb bay doors open, nuclear warheads primed. Our nuclear subs are all pointed at Moscow, torpedo tubes open and waiting. Russian missal commands have their gunners standing by, their fingers trembling on the triggers of fleets of armed nuclear ICBMs all pointed at NY and Washington.
The media is in a frenzy, not since the cold war have they had a legitimate shot at such fear mongering and the airwaves are crowded with the dinosaurs of that era, Henry Kissinger, Zibigniew Brzezinski and the slightly post cold war Madeleine Albright all doing what they did at the time of their service, warning of the most dire consequences no matter what move is made.
Time out! Pause for a little sensible reflection. Neither Russia nor the United States is interested in any renewal of the former hostilities. Sure we both use that old chestnut to rev up our nationalistic populations when we need to get their minds off something that we don’t want them concentrating on, like administrative failures or unpopular legislation that is actually good for the nation, but for the most part our relations with Russia are, because they are mutually advantageous, tranquil.
So what the hell is really going on? Well, the Ukrainians have done something really stupid. They know that the Russians are salivating over the land that holds their bases in the Crimea and this has been a bone of contention ever since 1955 when a dumb Russian premier gave the Crimea to Ukraine for no good reason.
The current problem started when the Ukrainians, instead of waiting two months until May and voting out Viktor Yanukovych, started demonstrations and threw him out of office, causing him to flee the country. This was really stupid, because now the Ukraine has an illegitimate government. They have a pretender in the presidential chair and have overthrown a legal, democratically elected government, proving to the world that they are unable to run their own country by their own rules. Along the way, they have given Russia a great excuse to occupy Ukrainian territory to protect its own military interests in Crimea.
Putin has done exactly what all the war-mongers in this country have already done all over the world. So why are all these same fascists screaming that he’s a monster and that we have to invade Russia immediately. If George Bush were president today and Dick Cheney vice-president, , nuclear bombs would already be falling on Moscow and Russian missals would already be in the air. That is exactly what nobody but a few idiots like John McCain want to happen.
We had far less reason to invade Iraq or Afghanistan than Putin has to move into Crimea, where incidentally his troops are being greeted joyfully by many of the residents of the area, an area of mostly Russian speaking people.
Did this move dissipate all the good will that Putin engendered through the Olympics? It’s hard to tell. How much good will does any Olympics actually generate? What he tried to do was establish a new international resort in Sochi. What he really did, was establish that you shouldn’t have winter games in a semi-tropical resort; a truly brain dead move.
But back to the problem. All the noise about what we should or should not do, is being handled very well by the White House, which is doing absolutely nothing; which is exactly what we should be doing. We have no dog in this fight. Secretary of State Kerry came out and talked way too much, running on about how horrible Russia was being; comical when one considers how we have reacted to our own, similar situations.
Kerry and the White House speak to sanctions, mostly financial, but those probably wont happen. Europe is too involved in the Russian economy to want us to screw that up. The most important thing is that no one in our government has yet drawn any lines or made any real threats which we cannot and will not honor. If there has been any real problem with Obama’s foreign policy it has been his failure to keep his mouth shut when he isn’t ready to back up his bullshit with action. I believe it was Teddy Roosevelt who said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” That’s really good advice for all presidents- and everybody else.
So what do we do? We do nothing. Right now the Ukraine has very little strategic importance to anyone but those European countries that get their oil and gas piped through it from Russia. This could be an excellent opportunity for them to expand their renewable energy sources and for the less thoughtful ones to explore fracting. Reducing their dependence on Russia’s fossil fuel resources can only be a good thing.
Other than that, no one should do anything. Putin doesn’t want to stay in the whole Ukraine. Even as this is being written, the legislature of Crimea, free of pressure from the rest of Ukraine, is preparing to vote to leave Ukraine and join Russia. This is something that would have been impossible without the Ukrainian opposition’s great blunder of throwing out the legitimate president. Putin’s only interested in the Crimea. He understands that the Ukraine could be another Afghanistan. It’s got a strong Islamic population, which only means trouble for him and if he stays there, he will have to stop laughing at us for making the same mistake he did in Afghanistan.
The beauty of Putin’s position is that in leaving, he doesn’t even have to save face. He can be the hero. He will have quashed the illegal uprising in a neighboring country in which he has assets to protect and once everything settles down he will magnanimously pull out, leaving them a better, more peaceful place; less, of course, Crimea.
Obama, except to the war-mongers will be just as well off. He will have acted sensibly, with caution and dignity (if he keeps his mouth shut) and avoided further hostilities in a world that surely doesn’t need any more. His, behind the scenes moves, can, if done right and publicized correctly, be shown to have advanced the cause of the Russians moving out and he will enhance himself as the great negotiator and peace keeper. Something we have needed in the White House for a long time.
I know it will screw up a lot of good news stories but it’s about time the media wrote about what’s really important and not just what sells soap.