The early reports on a war are normally a mixture of news, rumors, disinformation, and confusion. But Slate's Fred Kaplan is a knowledgeable and careful reporter on military affairs, So he's always worth reading. (Putin’s Invasion Has Begun Slate 02/24/2022)
Kaplan cites some relevant precedents. He actually knows something about them. We won't be able to say the same about the avalanche of bad historical analogies that we always get in situations like this. He notes, "Many Russian officers no doubt remember these lessons from their adventure in Afghanistan, which helped bring down the Soviet Union itself - just as Americans learned it in Vietnam, lraq, and belatedly Afghanistan."
It would be nice to think that the US foreign-policy and military establishments learned some relevant lessons from the Muslim terrorist networks they promoted in Afghanistan and from the "unintended consequences" they produced in later decades. (And also from Vietnam and Iraq!) Nice to think, anyway.
I see someone on my Facebook feed just posted a piece on Ukraine by Max Boot, one of the "respectable" neocons who has managed to be wrong about pretty much everything he has ever said about foreign policy. I can hardly wait to hear Little Tommy Friedman's commentary on how it's time to tell Russia to Suck.On.This. And what's Kenneth "Iraq-will-be-a-cakewalk" Adelson up to these days? Maybe we'll even hear from Richard Perle, the guy whose admirers nicknamed the Prince of Darkness.
And of course I look forward to the thousands of references for the rest of the year to Munich 1938 and Poland 1939. Putin himself has come up with a bizarre version of the latter as part of his strange revisionist history of Ukraine from earlier this week, in which among other things he says Ukraine was something the dirty Commies invented with a stroke of Lenin's colored pen, or something.
There was a two-paragraph note in the Vienna paper Standard saying that Putin is determined not to repeat the mistake Stalin made in 1939 when he signed a non-aggression pact with Germany because he didn't realize that the USSR wasn't prepared for war with Germany. (?!?) This was Putin's own garbled attempt at a "Poland 1939" analogy, Ukraine being the "Germany" in that take. (Anna Sawerthal, Putin will Kriegsfehler Stalins nicht wiederhole Der Standard 24.02.2022)
In German today, the term "Putin-Versteher" (someone who understands Putin) is used as an insult meaning, "Putin sympathizer". It seems to me that understanding an adversary would be kind of a necessary thing, but what do I know? I am curious to see what people who actually do understand Putin make of that and his whole "he-dirty-Commies-created-Ukraine" talk.
I know Putin's versions of a grand historical narrative have varied over the decades he's been in power. But trying to take over Ukraine seems like a level of recklessness that he's not shown before. And his justifications here seem kooky compared to those he's used for interventions in Georgia, Moldova, Syria and also Ukraine before now.
Is "retirement" really such a difficult concept for such guys? I mean, Mikhail Gorbachev surely has had a more pleasant time the last 30 years than if he had stayed in power this whole time!
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