Is Ukraine Worth a War? 

OpEds / Antiwar
By Murray Polner

“It’s the worst mess since the 1930s” William Pfaff, one of our shrewdest commentators, wrote early on in the International Herald Tribune. “No one wants war, wrote Pfaff,  but  “there are people in Moscow just like the people in Washington who say “if we don’t  follow through—if we don’t stand our ground—we’ll lose our ‘credibility’”  the pet word of our bellicose neocon and  think tank Chicken Hawks and their Moscow counterparts. In Washington we may one day hear accusatory  cries of Who Lost Ukraine?” as if, like China in 1949, it was ever ours to lose.

As a book review editor for another publication I receive lots of books.  In the past few months many have dealt with the one hundredth anniversary of World War I. If they have a common denominator it is that the war which cost millions of lives and  led to WWII, was entirely unnecessary and could have been avoided if one or more leaders and countries had had any awareness of the calamity awaiting them snd were not blinded by excessive nationalism and militarism. Geoffrey Wawro’s appropriately named  A Mad Catastrophe, for example,  is a perfect fit for our chaotic times while Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War excuses no nation , no leader, no special interest.

Warning: Important People on all sides, Be careful. You’re being egged on to join in a “game of chicken on the edge of the nuclear cliff,” as historian  Arno Mayer, late of Princeton, recently put it.

Why is it considered normal by the media and Western opinion that an ugly warmongering creature like John McCain be allowed to meddle in Ukrainian affairs, worsening an already dangerous situation, while Russia and the Donbass people are harshly criticized for far less provocative acts?

The perceptive anti-neoconservative and genuinely conservative magazine American Conservative warned that if NATO continues moving eastward next to Russia proper then trouble is inevitable.  A follow-up piece described Obama’s strategy of containing Russia, whatever that means. But buried in the story is that the Russians can bite back, and hard. US. troops and war materials still move through Russian territory to and from Afghanistan. The two nations are now in orbit at the international Space Station, the agreement between the two to decommission aged  Russian nukes continues.  And they  need one another to work out agreements aimed at  deactivating Syria’s chemical arsenal and getting Iran to curb its nuclear agenda.

Back to William Pfaff, whose IHT columns the New York Times (owners of the IHT) will not publish as they do Roger Cohen, his fellow IHT columnist: “One might think that this is the moment to talk with Russia about compromise and neutralization of the Russian-Ukrainian border.” It’s also past time that President Obama should  stand up to the hardliners in his administration “who seem to have been behind all this. Enough people have already purposelessly been murdered.”

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