Fredwitz on War (Speaking Truth to the Powerless)

As this illustrious column charges resolutely into the future, a few thoughts on geopolitical doings may, or for that matter may not, be of interest. I’ll try.

Regarding the war in Ukraine, massively different understandings exist. In   America and countries controlled by it, it is believed that Russia invaded without provocation to begin reconstituting the Soviet empire, the Ukrainians are bravely fighting to save their country, and eventually, all of Europe and the West must give them the weapons they need to oppose totalitarianism. Friends of mine in Washington are passionate about this and display Ukrainian flags in their yards.

Most of the world takes a far more favorable view of Russia, refusing to take sides, among them China, India, Mexico, almost all of South America, Central Asia, ASEAN, the Arab world,and black Africa. Many countries continue trading with Russia. Recently 130 countries attended Russia’s Economic conference in St. Petersburg. Russia is a major source of grain, petroleum, gas, fertilizer, these wanted by much of the planet.

Further,, the Ukraine looks, from outside of the Usasphere, to be just another of America’s unending imperial wars. If you follow news from non-Western sources, you see that nobody believes America’s protestations about spreading democracy, fighting crime, promoting human rights, and so on.

Another reason, frequently mentioned in the international blogosphere, is the legacy of colonialism. conservative friends poopoo this, having no grasp of its emotional power. The countries supporting America against Russia are the former colonial powers. The countries declining to oppose Russia are those colonized. Many have been militarily attacked by the former colonizers: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya. They have noticed this. In former times most of the world outside Europe has been invaded, occupied, and exploited. They remember.

The hostility is very real. Further, the Usasphere almost seems deliberately to encourage the animus. For example, recently a Romanian official made what he apparently thought was a clever remark likening Africans to monkeys. This went viral. An African official, maybe Zambian, said in a close paraphrase, “The West enslaved us for centuries, and now they want to lecture us on human rights?” One of the major hacks running Europe, I forget which, recently said that Europe was a garden and the rest of the world a jungle. (Josep Borrel, EU's chief diplomat—Ed.) This also went viral. Websites from Latin America often say ironically, “Aquí en la jungla….”

Outside of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, students of geopolitics see the US as having deliberately promoted the current war. In 1991 when the USSR collapsed, there were 16 countries in NATO which immediately began expanding eastward in obvious military encirclement of Russia with, today, thirty-one countries. When the American coup in Ukraine in 2014 put an American puppet in Kiev, if Russia had not annexed Crimea the American fleet would have been in Sevastopol, US bases in Crimea, and US nuclear missiles eight minutes from Moscow. Washington was simultaneously encouraging accession of Georgia to NATO, which would have put American forces on Russia’s border and an a thin Azerbaijan away from the Caspian. Russia said repeatedly that it would not allow entry of Ukraine in NATO, but the US kept pushing, and thus the war. In a sentence, the war is a carefully planned American imperial enterprise.

Have you heard this on CNN? How many Americans have ever heard of Sevastopol? Or, probably the Caspian?

The effects of the war?  By cutting Europe off from the cheap Russian pipeline gas on which its economies depended, and forcing it to buy pricey American LNG, the war both tightens American control over Europe, makes lots of money for US petroleum companies,and makes European industry less competitive. It also ensures that Europe will buy many tens of billions of dollars worth of American arms. From Washington’s point of view, what’s not to like?

So, while Bidenites offer the war as a courageous defense against barbarism, much of the world sees it as Washington’s using Europe and Ukraine in an attempt to weaken Russia before moving on to China, as officials in Washington have admitted. China is quite aware of this. So, hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Ukrainians. Perhaps more important in the long run, Washington has succeeded in causing Russia to shift its commerce eastward, selling to China and India and beginning to isolate the Usasphere. Europe may well regret this.

Now, the Grand, Indomitable, Horrific, and Really Scary Motingator Ukrainian Counter-offensive: It is a botch, as anyone familiar with America’s forgn policy and its military would have expected. Here it is, step by step, following Fred’s First Law,  an American war begins with overestimating American power, underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war it is getting into.

Step one: Overestimate America’s capacities. NATO’s superior technology, armament, tactics, and training would overwhelm the Russians. But didn’t.

Step Two: Underestimate the enemy. Russian training, morale, and weaponry could not possibly stand up to Ukrainians trained and armed by NATO,so the Slavic horde would collapse. But didn’t.

Step Three: Give the Russians plenty of time to build heavily fortified defensive lines. They did. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Step Four: Give up any hope of surprise. Of course, there was never any hope of surprise. Satellites do that.

Step Five: With half-trained troops using many cast-off weapons from other countries with which they are barely familiar, attack carefully prepared defenses across open terrain against an enemy with control of the air and massive superiority in artillery.

Step Six: Express surprise at the outcome.

If you do not believe that Washington runs on equal parts of arrogance, fantasy, and incompetence, here is former CIA director and US Central Command chief General David Petraeus who predicted on June 6, two days into Kiev’s southern offensive, that “the Russians will prove to be more brittle than the expectation is” when faced with Western-supplied armour, also claiming that Moscow’s troops were poorly trained, equipped and led and exhausted after a year on the front line without a break.”

Petraeus is not the only appalling dunderhead in the Miraculous City, but he is quite a good dunderhead. A freaking CIA director is clueless about exactly what he is supposed to know about?

America’s hugely expensive intelligence agencies catastrophically failed to estimate the military capacities of both the Ukraine and Russia, the effectiveness of weapons used by both sides, the weakness of the Russian economy, the degree of support for the war among the Russian population, the degree of world support for Washington, the effectiveness of sanctions, and the degree to which the confiscation of Russian financial reserves would drive the world away from the dollar.  Washington’s financial sanctions were going to bring Moscow to its knees. Remember Biden crowing that “the ruble is rubble”?

As the war goes increasingly badly for Washington, the hawks double down, sending more potent weapons. Desperation grows in the Potomac bubble. Huge egos are on the line, elections and, probably, the future of the Empire. How crazy will they get?

In Washington, particularly dangerous are the aged, sometimes senescent draft-dodging pussies of the ancient war on Vietnam, now turned into Depends Napoleons. Among them, Biden, Bolton, Trump, Bush II. To avoid libel charges, I will do nothing to identify this example.

Leadership? In America’s colonies, Ursula Borderline and Stoltenberg seem pedestrian, limited, and better suited to being motel managers than war leaders. Zelensky is the only one who seems to have brains, but combined with the character of an Amway salesman. Compare these to Lavrov, Putin, Xi Jin Ping, Zakharova, all smart.

Federal outlets, such as the NYT,  the WSJ, the Wapo,  the networks and social media, displayed their unequaled capacity for not acquiring information. They told us that the Russians were out of missiles. Except they weren’t. The Russians were out of artillery rounds. Except they weren’t. The Russian population was turning against Putin. Except it wasn’t. Russia was retreating before the Ukrainians. Except they weren’t. And so on.

China

We come, gasping, to Taiwan. As many in Washington have explicitly said, the purpose of the Ukraine is to cripple Russia and even break it into several countries under American control before moving on to China, Washington’s real target. The same approach is being used that was used with the Ukraine: push toward a “red line” that China cannot ignore until Beijing either surrenders, which it won’t, or fights.

Why does Washington care about Taiwan? A major, major reason is that Taiwant has TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest and most advanced chip fab. America cannot make the most advanced chips, Taiwan and South Korea being supreme in this as the technological center of gravity of the world moves eastward. Before Trump started the “trade” war, actually a new Cold War, TSMC sold chips to any who wanted them. Washington realized that it could not compete with China in many fields if the Chinese could buy chips from Taiwan (also Chinese, note). Thus the urgent need to control Taiwan.

And of course, a victorious war against Beijing would cement American hegemony, the purpose underlying all of everything.

Thus, though the American public is not being informed, Washington is rapidly and systematically doing things that can only be preparation for war with China. Among them is getting Japan to rearm. Selling nuclear submarines to Australia to Deter China. Running the Australia-UK-US naval treaty aimed at China (AUKUS). Running the Quad naval treaty (US-India-Japan-Australia). Arming Taipei with massive arms sales. Opening or reopening four military bases in the Philippines. Getting basing rights in Papua-New Guinea. This is rapid preparation for war with China, boys and girls.

What is going through the minds of the China hawks? Do they think China will back down, as they apparently expected that Russia would in the Ukraine? Do they expect a quick, decisive victory as they always do, though their own think-tank Rand has said they would likely lose? Do they have no exit strategy or plan B as they never do, in case things do not go as expected? Do they have any idea of the effects of starting a world war with a country that supplies almost everything to almost everywhere? Stay tuned. News at eleven.

LVT P5 AMTRAC. What we drove in my AMTRAC Battalion in Danang. Designed as a Landing vehicle, it had the gasoline tank in the bottom so that, when the Marines decided to used them on land around minefields, they were death traps. We were rushed into the war half-trained. Happy Memorial Day.

"Our elites–I use the term very loosely–hold soldiers in contempt and usually avoid military service, certainly as enlisted swine."

This might be a good time to consider militaries, war, and the sorry pogues in Washington who incite them.

Memorial Day? Why do governments celebrate those they have just sacrificed in the last war? Answer: To stir up group solidarity–we call it “patriotism”–so they can be more readily sacrificed in the next war. There is much of this, emanating presumably from New York’s ad agencies. Catchy slogans: “The Few, the Proud.” Air Force flyovers at the Super Bowl creaky veterans of WWII hobbled forth to thunderous applause, and stage props in a calculated jingoism. This ensures that young men, impelled by boredom and the yearnings of unsatisfied virility, will rush to the flag in the inevitable next war.

Why? Not for any good reason. wars are not about anything. They are just wars. They are what we do, year after year, century after century. Why? In the nature of things, the smart, avaricious, amoral, ambitious,  and manipulative rise. The government is a sieve for finding those least suited to govern. They will kill numbers without a twinge of conscience, fifty-five million in WWII, a million or two in Southeast Asia, so far a couple of hundred thousand in the Ukraine. Countries and soldiers submit to this because they are herd animals. War, instinctive, is in the blood. We make war as genetically as army ants.

Soldiers are not noble. Consider. The Israelis years back caught Adolf Eichmann, tried him for his part in the attempted extermination of Jews, and hanged him. His defense was that he was only following orders. The Jews didn’t buy it.  But why don’t we hang the American fighter pilots, for example   who bombed Iraq and killed thousands of people who had done nothing wrong? They too were only following orders.  They knew perfectly well what they were doing. Should we hang them? Why not?

In the gelded press of America, wars are bloodless and theoretical. They are less theoretical for the little girl of seven years in Baghdad, screaming as her intestines droop out of a belly opened by jagged shrapnel, with blood pooling round her feet, while her mother goes shrieking bugfuck crazy as she watches her child bleed to death and can do nothing about it.

You think this doesn’t happen? Just what do you think shrapnel does to a soft young belly. Maybe you need to see a war.

After a minute or two the little girl will drop to the ground because of blood loss. She will gasp and gurgle as heart and lungs, no longer with blood flow, try to work and she will probably look to her mother for help, and then lose consciousness, though her organs will try to work for another  few minutes.

Pilots are paid to do this, and get medals for doing it. There is nothing noble about soldiers. They are hit men as much as Guido and Vito in the employ of the Gamvinos.They will, and do, bomb, burn, and machine gun anyone. This is noble? How many of the enlisted men in Iraq knew where they were?

In human affairs, instinct rules. We are as territorial as dogs. When a strange dog appears on what Fido regards as his land, he rushes forth and barks furiously. If an ancient Russian Tu-95 prop driven converted bomber approaches American airspace, pilots sprint frantically toward waiting fighters to roar into the air to bark at the intruder. Grrr. Woof.

The military is often ridiculous, but it is fun. Until the shooting starts, fun is important to militaries. Watch night flight ops on the deck of a carrier in open ocean. Thirty knot wind over the deck, smell of burned kerosene, laconic chatter on commo links, howl of incoming plane at mil power, WHUMP!, tail hook engages. It is wild, orgasmic a video-gamer’s dream, but real.

Think parachuting, driving tanks, night scuba insertions on training missions and extractions by helicopter. (Soldiers go in like suppositories and come out like teeth.) There are the CICs of antiaircraft cruisers and the sonar spaces of nuclear submarines, full of screens and knobs. all appealing to the male love of controllable complexity. None of this is rational.

One reason why wars so often fail to turn out as expected is that soldiers are emotional, not rational, governed by steroid chemistry and the excitement felt by twelve-year-olds playing Capture the Flag. They are romantics pretending to be realists. Have you ever watched  your favorite football team, three points behind in the last five seconds of the game, QB falling back, falling back, dodging tacklers as the star running back streaks downfield, the desperate Hail Mary pass, and you are on the edge of your seat? Luke Skywalker flying his X-wing fighter if that is what it was, boring in on the Death Star, or whatever he bored in on? The Charge of the Light Brigade? Same glandular response.

Another reason for military failure is officer-rot. In decades of covering the armed forces, I noticed that officers often possessed physical courage, but not  moral courage.  In long periods without wars that have to be won, they become careerists, seeking promotion over all else. PowerPoint commandos, Perfumed Princes, They are submissive to authority, those who are not usually leaving after their first tour.

A lieutenant does not get promoted by telling the colonel that his reorganization of the logistic chain is hopelessly wrong. Today’s officer corps  panders hard to political fads such as sexual peculiarities, race over competence, and so on. They know what this does to morale and combat effectiveness, but will not risk that fat retirement by saying so. They will not report catastrophic defects in the expensive new weapon because they are angling for a juicy retirement job with the manufacturer.

It is not quite true that wars are entirely hardcoded in the genes. War profiteers, meaning in large part the arms industry, love them. From the standpoint of, say, Raytheon, a victorious war is bad because the contracts dry up. The same is true of a lost war. What is wanted is a long war not dangerous to America, as for example Viet Nam, Afghanistan, or the Ukraine. The dead and mutilated? What the hell. The earth is probably overpopulated as it is.

Governments know well how to work our instincts, which are those  of hyenas. The pack instinct is in us all. I remember in Marine boot these many years ago the excitement and exhilaration of running in close formation, thumpthumpthump of boots, Lefrylefryfefryright,chanting in chorus: “If i die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian cunt.” “Luke the Gook comes marching by, stick your bayonet in his eye.” “I know a girl who lives on a hill, she won’t do it but her sister will.” Thumpathumpathump, lefryelefrye. It is exhilarating, adrenal. And it works.

Military training is not the instruction of heroes in waiting to engage in the defense of country. It is the calculated manufacture of barbarians. Soldiers need to be stripped of all elements of civilization, replacing these with  a savagery and lack of morals or mercy, these inevitably morphing in many men into sadism.

In Parris Island we learned how to place a bayonet in an enemy’s kidney so that the shock, agony, and massive blood loss would quickly incapacitate him. I think this was more to instill savagery than as practical soldiery as it was not clear how I, with my bayonet, might be behind an enemy. We also learned how to break a man’s neck. (Get him from behind in a choke hold, jerk him sharply backward while falling forward, snapping his spinal column on the fulcrum of your forearm.)

The US military? A fraud, a money funnel to the arms industry, a laboratory for social experimentation, a tool for wrecking countries that we do not need to wreck. Do you believe I exaggerate? Think about it. Carefully.

In a thousand Legion halls we speak proudly of “our boys”sacrificing for their country. No. Soldiers don’t sacrifice. They are sacrificed. In the Legion halls the aging wounded try to believe they they are crippled, in wheel chairs, blind, trying to get a date while wearing a colostomy bag, half mad with the aftermath now called PTSD, for a worthy cause. It is too horrible to admit that they were suckered, used, and thrown aside. But they were. We were.

Patriotism? it is the herd instinct, nothing else. When people praise patriotism, they mean it as an affirmation of membership in the pack. The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were patriots, as were the Germans who invaded Poland. So were those who attacked the Twin Towers. Do we admire their patriotism?

Patriotism? You can be a decent human being, or a patriot, but not both. A patriot supports Washington’s wars, supports any war against any country. Morally speaking, they are just following orders. Moral they are not.

A personal memory that haunts me to this day, that I have mentioned before. On the eye ward, 4B, in what was then Vethesda Naval Hospital, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, there was a Tennessee kid about five beds down. He was stone blind, half of his face hamburger. I forget why. Grenade, RPG, mortar, something. I remember his high school girlfriend coming to see him. “Johnny, Johnny…oh Johnny….” So much for the wedding and the happy life together.

Thank you for your service.

If young men do not volunteer  to fight in a war of whose location they are unsure, they have traditionally been  conscripted. This does not quite fit the definition of slavery but it is certainly bond servitude. They go for training under threat of heavy jail time. If in combat they desert, scared and not knowing why they are fighting,  in most militaries in most times they were executed. If you believe they like fighting in some remote Afghanistan, offer them the choice of going home with no  penalty.

We don’t even like our troops not most of us. Yes, in the South, among populations of little education, in rural regions, soldiers are in genuine esteem. Among the high social classes, they are shunned. I went through high school in rural Virginia,  aboard Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory, as it was then called, where my father was a mathematician. The daughters of scientists and officers were forbidden to date enlisted men. This made sense, though not for reasons that could safely be expressed. What physical chemist wanted his daughter, being groomed for the University of Virginia or Swarthmore, to get tangled up with and perhaps pregnant by some lowlife who would spend thirty years drinking himself silly and selling fan belts at the NAPA outlet?

Our elites–I use the term very loosely–hold soldiers in contempt and usually avoid military service, certainly as enlisted swine. Among prominent draft dodgers during Vietnam, Biden, Bush II, Bolton, and Trump. Count the Ivy students in combat arms. There might be one somewhere, probably with a brain tumor.

Thank you for your service.