Posted on 05/24/2023 6:26:04 AM PDT by McGruff
“I don’t care for needless warmongering...”
You mean like Putin’s constant invasions of the former Soviet states?
Yep, lots of FReepers have taken their “isolationism” so far they have sidled right up next to the CPUSA in their foreign policy stances, if they haven’t exceeded them.
What reasons? Because after years and years if failure to implement Minsk the Russians finally tried to show they meant business? Only, under US pressure, Zelensky still refused to negotiate? That was Putin’s biggest mistake. Thinking his undersized “special operation” would get a peace deal the Russians could live with.
Maybe after Iraq, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, etc., we are more like Hitler — if you judge every country that takes military action against other countries as a Hitler, then we look more Hitlerish than any other lately, no? Of course we always claim the ones we’re bombing are Hitlers. Getting old.
Oh baloney. Hitting our ADIZ a hundred miles out like they do is not what we do. We have a habit of charging straight up to the 12 mile limit in an attack profile.
And for extra fun, we have had hundreds of deep overflights, with bomber and attack aircraft, besides the U2s. Many of those went in hundreds of miles. There may be one, somewhere, but I have never heard of a Russian combat aircraft penetrating into America for hundreds of miles.
We haven’t done the direct overflights in the era of satellites, but we routinely swarm around their borders to this day. They do nothing of that sort.
But to some people, DC is the good guys, so I guess it’s ok.
The “quick victory”, and 3 days meme is from DC and London. No Russian ever said it that I’ve seen.
They probably had a 10% hope and contingency that the Uke government might flee. But Sodom on the Potomac kept screaming three days. But nice straw man.
Nice mixing of clearly justified actions with unjustified ones, as if the US policy has been uniform.
Unfortunately, there is a cabal of Leftists, who when they get in power, are perfectly willing to destroy the USA, for their own purposes. Hence the stupid "wag the dog" war in former Yugoslavia, on the side of the Muslims, the stupid war against Libya, when Kaddafi had been tamed and was pretty much on the side of the USA. But the war in Iraq was clearly against Iraqi takeover of Kuwait and the threat to take over Saudi Arabia. Iraq II was only and extension of Iraq I, because Sadam would not keep his promises made in Iraq I.
Syria is a mix, but was mostly caused by Obama in his stupid push for an "Arab Spring" to advance Muslim anti-western ideology.
And a lot of people here slobber over DC and the Pentagram and EU NATO.
—”No Russian ever said it that I’ve seen.”
Your lack of knowledge on the topic does NOT create any facts or make it so.
And the armed putsch of 2014 in Ukraine was also under Obama’s watch and instigated by the same bunch now in power (Biden, Nuland, Sullivan, et al). Same as Libya and Syria. Biden was all in on our doings in former Yugoslavia. How I despised him back then, him and Lived both.
As for justified, the Russians think they are justified, same as we thought we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lots of people in other countries thought Iraq II was not justified because of the WMD claim. As for Saddam “not keeping his promises”, one could say the same re the promises made in Minsk. So if we were justified by unkept promises on the target of our military aggression, why isn’t Russia? Sure, we see ourselves as the good guys, meanin’ no harm, and all, but don’t we look like hypocrits?
While we, as Americans, can blame our “stupid” wars on a “cabal of leftists”, how do you think our “ stupid wars” look to the rest of the world? Does NATO look like the “purely defensive” force it claims to be after Kosovo and Libya? How about all our “regime change” operations, whether achieved through hard (military) or soft (color revolution type stuff) power? We bombed the Serbs and Libya, used soft power in countries like Egypt and Ukraine. As we have seen, soft power can result in very bad outcomes, including violence and death, for the peoples we use it on.
Just what other countries do you think Putin is going to invade “if we don’t stop him in Ukraine”? He truly has no interest in conquering Poland, the Baltics, etc. He does see Crimea as an existential interest (with good reason) and all the loose talk about turning Sevastopol into a NATO port and parking missiles in Ukraine near the Russian border were seen as existential threats to Putin. Not entirely unreasonably.
If you read the stuff coming out the think tanks Nuland, Sullivan, Biden, the Kagans, etc., subscribe to, it’s easy to see their agenda. They imagined they could instigate a color revolution in Russia to topple Putin after the 2014 putsch in Ukraine (and then Russia would break up and cease to exist in its present borders), and now they think the war in Ukraine will topple Putin and break Russia into pieces. They even have plans for going after the pieces.
Me, I think we’ve been foolish. Had we acted responsibly in former Yugoslavia and not treated Russia like a beaten dog back in the 1990s, Putin may well never have come to power. We could have had Russia as a quasi-ally vis-à-vis China, our true rival. But we acted stupidly, and now, however this war ends up, the Europeans will have a Sino-Russian alliance on their border, not just poor old Russia. Quite a feat, as the Russian people desperately wanted to join the West and have democracy and all that back in the 1990s. But we showed them what we were really all about: building up China (their longtime natural quasi-enemy) and kicking down Russia. Stupid, stupid, stupid on our part. I always thought so.
It’s all very sad. Poor Ukraine was a very fragile democracy and had never been its very own country before 1991 (and no one called himself a “Ukrainian” (even as a merely ethnic identity) or called his language “Ukrainian” much before the 1920s. It was the most corrupt republic of the former USSR (with Kiev rivaling Moscow in that department), much to overcome. Whether leaning westwards or eastwards, its leaders before 2014 pretty much tried to walk a neutral line between Russia and the West.
Had Ukraine stuck to a neutral stance, it could have served as a bridge between East and West and, if it could have tamped down the corruption, perhaps flourished in that role. Kinda like Turkey. I must say Turkey has done well for itself playing off the West, China and Russia, yes, done very well by itself in the process. But no, we had to get all “Russia-Russia-Russia” and make an enemy out of Russia and poor Ukraine became like a rag doll being torn apart between us and Russia.
My heart breaks for the Ukrainian people. They voted overwhelmingly for peace in their last election, but Zelensky either could not or would not deliver (I’ve posted here before about “could not” vs “would not” and leave it as a question mark in my mind). So here we are now. I make no predictions about the outcome of this war, only that however it turns out, China will be the big winner and the Ukrainian people the big losers.
As for Putin, some here who have drunk the neocon koolaid see him as Hitler. Some as a sort of evil genius. Those who lap up the Russian propaganda see him as some sort of crusader for Christian and conservative values fighting against the WEF “cabal”. I don’t see him as any of those things, so I guess leaves me the odd man (actually woman) out.
He’s certainly intelligent, but no super genius. He’s not very imaginative and has not been able to come up with a unifying vision for his vast, sprawling hodgepodge of a country (which sorely needs one — under the USSR, there was international communism, now there’s not much of anything). He did clean up the lawlessness and cruelties inflicted on his people by the various mafias (operated mainly by the oligarchs, similar to situation in Ukraine, only it affected ordinary people more cruelly in Russia during the Yeltsin years), so he gets major points for that. I don’t think he’s particularly Christian (or even moral in the sense we on FR would mean that word, although he does seem to subscribe to a code of sorts). He can do cold, vicious, sinister things when it suits his purpose, even thuggish things. I do think he is a Russian patriot and does care about his country, though. He’s certainly deeply flawed in many ways, but he’s not a madman, nor bloodthirsty, and no Hitler out to conquer Europe. He’s fairly pragmatic. He guessed wrong when he sent that little (emphasis on “little”) “special operation” force into Ukraine at the beginning. So he’s hardly the 5-D chess-playing uber-genius some claim. He way underestimated the neocons hatred of Russia and their utter dedication to their plan to tear apart Russia no matter what it cost Ukrainians. (Not that I think their plan will work. What matters is they think it will.) He thought them more moral than they are. He really should have known bettsr. They’ve been showing their cards for three freaking decades now.
Anyway, everyone can see the Russians are barely up to whooping up on Ukraine, let alone succeeding in “gobbling up” more countries. And Putin can see it too — even if he wanted to do that, which he doesn’t. Putin has enough headaches keeping his hodgepodge country together without adding recalcitrant Poles, Lithuanians, etc., to the mix — or Western Ukrainians. This “Putin has to be stopped before he gobbles up more countries like Hitler” stuff is silly. If you want to be pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian, there are far sounder arguments for your case.
Let me remind you they now own four new oblasts. They aren’t giving them up. Sad as it may sound, it is reality.
Let’s hope Vlad continues to show restraint, Odesa may still be in his cards. It depends on how much the collective West escalates.
Outstanding point. The 'toon administration had a real success back then when their new creation of Bosnia wound up being run by an Iranian proxy.
RE: US Air Force’s European exercises
You said, “We are asking for WWIII.” Whereas, the Russians have greatly increased bomber flights at our border in recent years.
[2021]
Intercepting record numbers of Russian aircraft off of North America’s west coast has stretched Air Force units thin, a top service official in Alaska said Wednesday.
“We have certainly seen an increase in Russian activity. We intercepted over 60 aircraft last year.
I am aware they all do it. Difference is there is a hot war over there.
And Western journalists were shocked and dismayed to see Mein Kamf in the windows of Sarajevo bookstores after the war was over. I wasn’t surprised. It was in the windows of Zagreb bookstores during the war. Some things are very, very slow to change. But it looks like Croatia has come a long way and I am glad to see who they elected as their current president (and he refuses to meet with neo-Nazi veterans’ groups, the first to do so).
Russia does it all the time to the US in Alaska.
Post #33 I posted earlier and I am not going to change my mind.
Looking at the last 15 months, that was correct.
The Kremlin appears to be in autodestruct mode. All because millions of Ukrainans didn't want to resume participation in Soviet stupidity.
Yugoslavia was not Warsaw Pact. In fact, Tito’s entire defense structure was in preparation for a possible Soviet invasion. During WWII, the Croats were more Nazi than the Nazis. They had a Treblinka before the Germans did, only it was for Serbs. They happily turned over their Jews to the Germans for shipment out to their death camps and ran their own death camps for Serbs and Roma. The Croats were so horrifyingly bloodthirsty they shocked even their SS minders, who reported their disgust back to Berlin. When Roosevelt learned of how the Croats behaved, he declared they should never have their own country.
The Bosnian Muslims were likewise allied with the Nazis. Izetbegovic served in the Young Muslims. Mein Kamf is still popular in several Muslim countries. Before the wars of the 1990s, the Bosnian Muslims were mostly secular, but then, well, things kinda changed. To the dismay of normal sane Bosnian Muslims.
In Croatia it had nothing to do with Soviets and everything to do with a nasty sort of nationalist revival echoing the only time it had been “independent” in history, when it was an “independent” puppet state of Hitler’s. There was never any real “de-Nazification” there, just Tito’s Brotherhood and Unity thing. So it came bubbling up at independence. Nazi stuff in the markets, coffee bars decorated with photos of Hitler and Pavelić and Nazi symbols. Revival of Nazi-era slogans and sings. Heil Hitler salutes. Streets and squares named after Nazi-era leaders, etc. Some parallels with the neo-Nazi thing in Ukraine, but not exactly the same.
In exactly which former Warsaw Pact countries were these pins being sold? I certainly never saw any in Hungary during the 1990s, and can’t imagine the Czechs going for that stuff. The West Germans would have spanked the East Germans if they saw that stuff. So that leaves Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania.
And by the way, in case you missed it, Russia is no longer the Soviet Union. That evil monstrosity died over three decades ago.
You and the other Putin pukes have been wrong about everything for 16 months. The temporarily occupied areas will be liberated and those hammer and sickle flags will be hauled down. The criminal Russians, the Chechens, and the other Mohammedans will be killed. Death to all Bolsheviks!
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