Posted on 11/12/2022 1:36:20 AM PST by ganeemead
Douglas MacGregor describes the current situation
Countdown to insults incoming directed at you and McGregor. I enjoy listening to McGregor, is he correct I have no idea, but having someone offering a counter opinion instead of everyone being labeled a Putin lover or stooge
Warzones are never good places to be in if you’re a woman or child or weak man.
Putin is a bad man. That’s a given.
But would we let Russia make the SAME type of treaty with Mexico that NATO was going to make with Ukraine?
We wouldn’t let them do it with cuba.
We almost went to war over it.
But once Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, NATO can put missiles right at Russia’s doorstep.
How is it different than the cuba situation?
Now the Ukrainian leader ha demanded things that aren’t gonna happen in order to make a peace treaty.
War crimes court??
What court did Bush and cheney face for massacring Iraqis while SAUDI ARABIA was the country behind the terror attacks.
And God forgive me...I WAS ALL FOR THE IRAQ WAR.
What a sucker I was.
And what is our vital interest in Ukraine?? The graft that goes to dems??
If they hadn’t been conned by clinton, they’d have nukes on their turf and there’d be no problem.
But it is what it is.
The US WANTS Ukraine to keep fighting and if Anyone thinks that eventually this war won’t turn around, they’re taking a BIG GAMBLE with Ukrainian lives.
During a very cold winter with no heat as Russia is destroyed generators etc.
I JUST HOPE we don’t have any men on the ground there.
Putin knows this thing has to end. His army sucks.
But the pressure from the US and NATO on Ukraine to NOT MAKE peace is too much.
So the war will drag through the winter...and many, many people will die.
And sooner or later an American “contractor” will get killed there and we will be at war.
Make peace.
Ukraine should demand a LOT
But not the impossible.
War crimes. Half the leaders on the planet would be in front of a court for crimes against humanity.
Biden supports Ukraine. I’m never on Joesef Stolen’s side.
Same
“But would we let Russia make the SAME type of treaty with Mexico that NATO was going to make with Ukraine?”
NATO has had an alliance with Ukraine which the USA benefited from in Afghanistan and various non-offensive projects. Ukraine hosted exercises and participated in training.
Wgat the Russkies always leave out is, these NATO engagements were never aimed at Russia. They weren’t interested in Russia at all.
From 2001 to 2015 NATO was focused almost entirely on the Article 5 invocation against Al Qaeda, the rise of the Islamic State, and the threats from China and North Korea.
It’s almost as if Putin felt humiliated by NATO not seeing Russia as an enemy the same way it saw the USSR as an enemy.
That’s where the Mexico comparison falls flat. The USSR doesn’t exist anymore. The defence alliances created since do not serve a belligerent superpower.
So if Mexico had done a deal with Cuba and China to host training, and assist with joint operations in Asia, would America have felt so threatened by a possible invasion via Brazil without any shred of evidence that anything of the kind was in the works, that it would’ve invaded Brazil?
Of course not. America isn’t retarded enough to start a preemptive land war over something’s as trivial as “worst case scenario” realpolitik.
If America was that retarded, it’d have to grossly misrepresent its case for “self defence” for domestic consumption the way Russia did because anyone with a cautious, healthy scepticism would see right through it if they could scrutinize the paranoia. So you’d see a clampdown on independent media and restriction on social media to allow the facts to be distorted... Just as happened across Russia in the run-up to war.
Finally, there’s the Zhirinovsky factor. The dude stood up in the chamber last summer and announced the day of the invasion of Ukraine. That was months BEFORE the Kremlin presented its idiotic “do all this or else” terms to NATO.
So we all can see that neither NATO nor Ukraine had any chance of talking Russia out of it. They were mobilising to invade from March 2021, and advertising that they were doing it. Russia’s negotiated strategy was “give us the annexed and separatist held regions by February 2022 or we’ll invade in late February 2022 and take them AND MORE.”
Would America be so stupid as to make its war aims tgat obvious? We’ve known all along that NATO expansion per se isn’t Putin’s real beef - he’s okay with NATO expanding into countries he doesn’t plan to annex.
We didn’t invade Cuba to try and free it from its communist oppressors
We almost went to war because Russia sent war ships towards Cuba ( trying to get to Cuba)
NATO has repeatedly stated publically that Ukraine will never be added
Putin thought the Ukraine would be easy like Georgia. It wasn’t. He miscalculated
McGregor’s name on an article isn’t inviting ridicule because people are meanies.
We laugh at him because a week after the big invasion he declared the Ukrainian army destroyed and the Russians the clear winner.
This guy’s a total jerk.
Russian troops still occupy large areas of Ukraine, European economies are in freefall, the water and power have been cut off too much of the country, and Ukraine is begging for money on a daily basis.
Doesn’t sound like Russia is losing, they are certainly not a super military, in fact they seem to be really poor at war fighting.
A thing that sometimes happens to intelligent people who don’t have their feet firmly on the ground.
He believes the military screwed him and instead of being a Colonel he should have been a 4 star General. Now he has chosen to hate everything about America and embrace even the most insane propaganda pushed by American enemies.
Sad!
Ukraine isn’t the only one descending into chaos. Europe is being destroyed and it is all self inflicted to appease America’s desperate attempt to hold on to hegemony. Americans beware, we are next on the chopping block.
BILD
Christian Kreiss, German professor of economics at Aalen University, on the destruction of industry and the German middle class: “I have been working in economics for 40 years, and what I see now I have never seen before. Black clouds hang over Germany.
Leading analysts from the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry say we will see an economic contraction of 20 to 30 percent. And this is not just anyone’s opinion, but the president of this association himself. And the president of the Federation of German Industry says that our industry is under threat.
I’ve never seen anything like this - 10% inflation. We’ve printed a lot of money in the last few years. Checks have been written by this government that led us to believe that everything would be okay, that we could somehow get rid of it all with government money. But that’s not the case at all.
And above all, this is an attack on our middle class. The lockdowns have already seriously undermined small and medium-sized businesses, and so does the current sanctions policy of our government, especially our duo of high-ranking green politicians, who want to stir up more and more antipathy toward the Russian people and are actually pushing this war further. This is damaging and on a massive scale.
This sanctions policy - no more oil from Russia, no more gas - is so absurd. This gas then travels around the world and ends up here in the form of fracked dirty gas.
For example, Burbock says that the gas from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline serves the Russian system and Putin - it is, of course, easy for her to say. And this Habek, who shines with incompetence, would be better off writing children’s books.
The topic with Ukraine is a complete absurdity. We are kicking ourselves in the nose with this energy policy, it does not help Ukraine one bit and does not harm Russia one bit. So sanctions in any case cause us significant damage. They do not help Ukraine at all. We shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Exactly right about MacGregor.
LOL. How many times did you cut your nose off while posting it? NATO created to contain Russia.
Regarding Afghanistan, Russia contributed much more than Ukraine.
Ukraine sent 5000 troops to aid in Iraq. Russia funded Code Pink.
Russia reported conspiracy to commit 9/11 before it took place and provided tons of other intelligence, provided own logistics for the effort and persuaded Central Asian government to grant the US basing rights.
Col. Douglas MacGregor is a Trump favorite.
November 12, 2022
Responsible Statecraft
Macgregor, a West Point graduate, is an acquired taste: outspoken and controversial. He has flagged reporters with his statements about immigrants (we need martial law at the U.S.-Mexico border), Iranians (we need to look for areas where we can cooperate), Afghanistan (we have no business being there) Iraq (we should have left, long ago), and Syria (we should get out immediately). Those views aren’t to everyone’s liking, but they’re especially controversial in the military, whose staid stance on foreign interventions does not countenance the kind of dissent in the upper ranks that Macgregor represents. Macgregor, it is said, has refused to “stay in his lane,” has been too outspoken, too vocal, and not really a team player.
Yet, senior military officers quietly admit that in terms of sheer intellect, no one quite matches Macgregor. Several years ago, I asked a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer to name each of the services’s most creative thinkers. His answers were entirely predictable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of those in uniform, except when it came to the Army. He didn’t hesitate: “It’s Doug Macgregor,” he said. “He’s the best thinker they have, living or dead.” Retired Gen. Tommy Franks would probably disagree.
Franks, the former commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom, brought Macgregor (then still in uniform), to U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa in the run-up to the Iraq War in early 2002 to brief his war planners. Macgregor took a roundabout, but effective route, in getting there: he had briefed Newt Gingrich on his own war plan for Iraq, and Gingrich was so taken by what he had to say that he recommended him to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted that Franks hear him out.
Macgregor’s appearance in Tampa is now a part of Army legend. The U.S. military can take Baghdad with 15,000 troops, Macgregor announced to the room of uniformed experts. The statement stunned Franks, as did Macgregor’s advice on “Phase IV” (postwar) operations — which had not been mentioned in his briefing. Why wasn’t it there? Macgregor was asked. “The reason it’s not there,” Macgregor said, “is because we’re not going to need it. We’re going to turn the governing of Iraq over to the Iraqis, then we’re going to get out.”
Whereupon Mike Fitzgerald, one of Franks’ most senior planners, got up from his seat and left the room. “I think it was at that point that Doug’s career ended,” a fellow West Point graduate says. That’s probably true, but only in part.
While Macgregor retired soon after his Tampa appearance, he did so only after talking with then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki. Macgregor told Shinseki that the Army needed to get lighter and faster, cutting away its logistic tail and its top-heavy officer corps. Shinseki not only agreed, he was planning his own Macgregor-like series of reforms. But the talk with Shinseki wasn’t the first time Macgregor had made his mark. Shinseki’s immediate predecessor, Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer, required his senior staff to read “Breaking the Phalanx,” Macgregor’s 1997 book on how the Army should fight. Reimer helped to put Macgregor’s innovations on the map. This is where we need to go, Reimer told his staff.
And then there’s 73 Easting.
Arguably, none of Doug Macgregor’s later influence would have been possible without the Battle of 73 Easting (named for its map coordinates — its “phase lines”), which is still studied by armored officers as one of the most significant, and most lopsided, tank victories in the history of American warfare. The battle took place on February 26, 1991 — when elements of the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, under Macgregor, took on the tanks of the Tawakalna Division of Saddam Hussein’s vaunted Republican Guard. Macgregor expertly maneuvered his tanks through the enemy lines — directing his tank leaders, one of whom was H.R. McMaster, through the enemy lines. Macgregor lost one man killed, but his tank squadrons destroyed dozens of armored vehicles. The battle had a deep effect on Macgregor, who remembers talking with one of the Iraqi prisoners after the battle: “Why do you not go to Baghdad now?” the prisoner asked him. “You have the power. Your army rules the heavens and the earth. Do you think we love Saddam?” In the years that followed, the Iraqi prisoners’ words haunted Macgregor. The road to Baghdad was open — but America didn’t take it.
Ironically, in one of those odd twists of history, Macgregor’s role as the commander of his tank squadrons is often ignored, while McMaster is remembered and celebrated. Then too, as any senior Army officer will testify, Macgregor’s outspoken and often too-public critique of his own service hurt his chances for promotion. Macgregor questioned everything: why are we staying in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria? Why are we prosecuting these endless wars? Doug Macgregor had lots of time to ponder these questions, particularly during Operation Iraqi Freedom, as his kinsman and fellow officer, McMaster, was adding to his laurels during the Anbar Awakening, where he performed brilliantly. Macgregor, meanwhile, was sidelined and marginalized, with a position at the National Defense University.
And so, it seems the McMaster-Macgregor narrative was set. McMaster got his stars, while Doug Macgregor went on to a career as a military historian. McMaster became the acolyte to greatness (the up-and-coming friend of David Petraeus), a controversial president’s national security advisor (one of the “adults in the room”), a gruff-voiced patriot (warning us incessantly of looming threats in Russia, China, Iran, etc.), and all-around “team player.”
Macgregor has always shrugged this off: his old friend deserves his stars, deserves his praise, and has proved his courage. Team player? It’s true: McMaster has been so fitted to his uniform that he looks like a throwback, a latter-day Patton. He’s the quintessential team player in a service that prizes staying in your lane, that rewards teamwork. And Macgregor? Oddly, and ironically — and for all of his outspoken views on ending America’s endless wars, Doug Macgregor has also been a team player.
He’s just been on the wrong team.
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