Latest Ukrainian Update

 First whole part of this is on conspiracy theories about the Wagner Group's Prigozhin. Pretty wild stuff. 

Second part brings to mind a German word I learned a long time ago, schwerpunkt. It means focus of effort and is often the difference between success and failure. The invasion of France in 1940 was a marvelous example of a successful application of schwerpunkt. The German army focused upon the Ardennes (it was thought that armored vehicles couldn't penetrate the thick forests, oops!) and the German army stayed together until it hit the English Channel. The German army acted as a single armored fist that succeeded rather quickly.

The Soviet Union was NOT a good example. Der Fuhrer split up the invading army into three more-or-less equal groups and focused first on this area, then on that area, until winter caused the army to stop. The Stalingrad campaign was okay, but by then the army had been weakened, the Soviet army had regained a lot and the Germans really needed to account for the winter calling a halt to everything. 

In 2022, the Russian strategy of having four axes of advance showed rather quickly that it was simply too many axes. The Kyiv and Kharkiv axes were abandoned, and the Donbas and Crimean axes met and formed a "bridge" and then tried to advance Westward. 

According to the blogger, Ukraine has left trying to re-take Bakhmut and has focused all of its efforts to Melitopol in order to break that "bridge" between the Donbas and Crimea.  This approach is very heavily guarded but promises the biggest effect on Russian forces. 

Peace proposals for Ukraine

Was just talking with some buddies about the war in Ukraine. They said that the US Peace Council has advocated peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. I then looked at various peace advocates. Russian diplomat Lavrov says that Russia and Ukraine were close to a deal in April, but Zelenskyy agreed with the US and Britain that the deal should not move forward. Found a very interesting paragraph (press people call this the “nut graph,” the paragraph that sums up the most important point in the piece).

Russia has repeatedly rejected Ukrainian and Western demands that it withdraw completely from Ukraine as a condition for any negotiations. US President Joe Biden has indicated he would be willing to talk with Putin if the Russian leader demonstrated that he seriously wanted to end the invasion.

It’s very difficult to see how any negotiations can even begin with Ukraine ceding any territory to Russia. That’s not a permanent or lasting peace as the war would simply continue once Russia had rebuilt its currently devastated army.

Is the possibility of nuclear war increasing? Actually, it’s decreasing. China has made it quite clear to Russia that they won’t put up with Russia using nuclear weapons. India has said the same. The US has also stated that it would respond to a nuclear launch by Russia with non-nuclear weapons.

Update: So if I were in Putin's position and wanted peace with Ukraine, how would I begin? I'd probably agree, in principle, that Russia must leave the territory of Ukraine. Russia's doing the exact opposite,  

"I think you only have to look at Putin's own words in a recent conversation with President Erdoğan of Türkiye in which he says unless and until Ukraine accepts the new territorial realities, as he put it, there's nothing to negotiate. In other words, unless and until Ukraine acknowledges and accepts the fact that the territory that Russia has seized by force, it's not getting back, there's nothing to negotiate. That of course is in and of itself a nonstarter," [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] added.

Letter to Philadelphia Inquirer

 Piece by Marc Thiessen

“The 10 worst things Biden did in 2021” Jan 3

“[Biden] showed weakness in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

When an America president (or any national leader, for that matter) considers military options, he has to “game it out” as far as possible and to consider the likely consequences. To make threats that we can't fulfill would be to invite a far worse catastrophe than to give up land that we're not prepared to go all-out to defend.

How many Americas are willing to give their lives for a free Ukraine? Could we really sustain a military supply line? Overconfidence and underestimating the difficulty of the job could lead to a far woes disaster than just looking weak. I suspect Biden and his team looked at those questions and decided the US simply wasn't ready for a war there. Biden's doing pretty well on this issue, keeping temperatures low and being open to discussions.

“His withdrawal from Afghanistan was the most shameful foreign policy calamity in my lifetime”.

Casualties among Afghan civilians were steadily rising from year to year during both the Obama and Trump Administrations. Sure, the US military was in shape to continue to fight a war there, but the country of Afghanistan was suffering more and more damage all the time.

Former President Donald Trump reached an agreement with the Taliban (The official government of Afghanistan played no role in this agreement) a year before he left office, to reduce the number of US troops in the country to fewer than 9,000. The resulting force may have been enough to hold onto a small portion of Kabul, but any determined effort by the Taliban would have been sufficient to wipe out that modest contingent.

As South Vietnam suffered an abrupt collapse after years of American occupation and training and equipping , so too did Afghanistan. It was only due to Biden's better diplomacy that we were able to continue to get Americans and Afghan allies out of the country after the Taliban had taken all of the rest of Kabul.

Yes, a splinter group of ISIS attacked and killed some American troops, but had we not been actively talking with and working with the Taliban, our situation there could have ended up much worse.

Iran invasion

I first looked into the idea of invading Iran back in 2003, after Baghdad fell, in response to neocons saying "Real men go to Tehran." Situation hasn't changed much. The pressure on the moderate president Hassan Rouhani is certainly having a political impact, and international business is being forced away from doing business in Iran, but as Rouhani gets less popular, it’s the anti-American hard-liners in Iran that politically benefit.

I said at the time that the US needed a "Colonial Corps" to successfully occupy Iraq. What we urgently needed at the time and what we’ll need to occupy Iran is a large group of paramilitary administrators to run things at the municipal level. A piece from the Modern War Institute says: "Right now the US military does not have personnel with deep specialization in conducting or overseeing the type of occupation that Karle argues is an unfortunate necessity of being prepared for all possibilities."

Also, US air operations have been ongoing for the past 25 years, meaning that tool has gotten pretty worn and dull. But as in Iraq, battlefield success is only the first step. Iranians are trained, organized and ready to undertake extended guerrilla war.

First, if I were to invade Iran, there are a couple of possibilities we can eliminate. Strike from Afghanistan? That country isn't really secured as the Taliban is alive and well and there have been battles around Farah, right about where a US invasion of Iran would jump off from. 

 

Strike from Pakistan? The country puts up with our using them as a supply dump for Afghanistan and even that has caused friction in the past.

Strike from Iraq? The country is modernizing under it’s newly elected leader Muqtada al-Sadr, but there are definitely troubles there. A large American presence in the country could be disastrous. It would a big risk to our supply lines.

Strike past the Strait of Hormuz and from the Persian Gulf? American military people believe the US Navy would prevail, but clearly, for the Navy to launch an attack from the Gulf would require some extensive fighting beforehand. It’s possible Iran would block it off and leave our naval forces stranded in the Gulf with no re-supply able to get in. Even a temporary cut-off would be a humiliation.

If I were in charge, I'd hit their beaches right above the Gulf of Oman, the town of Chabahar appears to be a good landing spot. Kerman is a substantial city that's well short of Tehran and there are nuclear plants North and West of there. That's about 600 miles from Chabahar, some of the terrain fairly smooth, some rocky and fairly elevated. Our supply lines would be getting attacks long before our forces reached Kerman. Our Army may make it over a thousand miles more, all the way to Tehran, (about 1,800 miles from Chabahar).

But we'd need to guard every mile of that supply line or, at the very least, to deliver all supplies in armed convoys. What would be the consequences of an insufficient force to cover supply lines? The Iraqi ammunition dump of Al Qaqaa was looted after the Army passed by and left too small a detachment to guard it. To get the necessary troops to guard the supply line, we'd need to institute a draft. That would be hugely unpopular!

More on US and Iran deal

The US Ambassador to Britain sobs a great gusher of crocodile tears about how Iran cares so little for the opinions of its people. "Iranian protesters were chanting that 'the nation is begging, while the master lives like God.'”  Not that the US has any sort of problem with income inequality or that the current presidential administration was any sort of shining example of that [/snark]. Newsweek: “The politically powerful rich get to pay low taxes, while the politically marginalized poor bear the burden but can do nothing about it.”

Iran "is sponsoring Hizbollah terrorists in Lebanon." Hizbollah is part of the Lebanese government with cabinet positions. They're hardly just "terrorists." 

Iran "is arming militants in Yemen." The Hindu says Yemen is "among the poorest in West Asia" and that the United Nations is calling the Yemen situation "the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis." Yemen has now suffered "three years of relentless bombing." The piece doesn't even mention Iran, meaning that Iran is not playing a meaningfully serious role there.

Yes, the US President decided to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement three months ago. "The decision was not taken lightly." Erm, actually, it was. The President did not present any real reasons for pulling out. There was no real debate on the issue and no non-supporters have been converted into supporters. The reasons given by the BBC are 1. Shredding the Obama legacy, 2. A pivot to Netanyahu and 3. New faces in the room. None of these count as weighty or serious reasons.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made extended remarks on why the US wanted to pull out of the nuclear agreement with Iran. I have to say, I wasn't the slightest bit impressed. The editorial by the US Ambassador to the UK, Robert Wood, isn't any more convincing.

Israel as the new Goliath

So Jewish people holding flags with the Star of David were not permitted to take part in a gay pride parade. The explanation from the parade organizers tells us that the decision had nothing to do with Jewish people and everything to do with the policies of the Israeli government as regards Palestinians. Statistics show that the Republican Party is very solidly pro-Israeli and the Democratic Party is about a third pro-Israel, a third pro-Palestinian and a third undecided. If there's any one single individual that has caused this situation to come about, that would be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By ignoring the President's role in foreign policy and speaking to Congress without President Obama's permission, Netanyahu strongly contributed to making support for Israel a partisan issue. 
But the heart of the issue is shown in the below story and it shows that Israel has become a ruthless, iron-booted occupier. A Palestinian village within Israel's borders had received solar panels from Holland. After the panels had been supplying power to the village for a year, Israel abruptly removed them, giving notice only when the removal of the panels was halfway complete, thereby giving the village no opportunity to appeal the decision. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel was seen as the scrappy, resourceful David to the Goliath of the surrounding Arab states. Now Israel appears to be the Goliath that is stepping on Palestinians.

Suggestion that we intervene in Syria against ISIS

So I saw this piece today: “The Pentagon could send conventional military forces into Syria”

My major problem with it is of course that it would be an utter quagmire as the US has no natural allies in Syria, except perhaps the Kurds and they’re only in the Northern part of that country. We’d get bogged down again even worse than we were in Iraq. But, an even worse problem is that the Daesh/ISIS problem is largely solved anyway.

Let’s put this in terms of World War II analogies. Everyone knows about the battles of Stalingrad (Nazi Wehrmacht vs the Soviet Union), Midway (Imperial Japanese Navy vs the US) and El Alamein (The Nazi Afrika Corps against the British), where the German/Japanese advances were stopped. Then there were three battles where the Axis powers might possibly have been able to stop the Allies and reversed the course of the war, but didn’t and victory for the Allies was never really in doubt afterwards. These were Kursk (In the Soviet Union), Guadalcanal (In the Pacific) and the Normandy Landings (France).

The situation with Daesh right now is comfortable after the Kursk/Guadalcanal/Normandy stage. Daesh has lost a great deal of land and people. They’re hanging onto a part of the city of Mosul, the Western part, but they’ve lost much else of their Iraqi territory. There’s even talk of their leaving Raqqa, their capitol in Syria.

Are there further battles the US may wish to fight in the region?

The main conflict in Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and Shi’ite militias, against an array of rebel groups aiming to oust him, including some that have been backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies.

This is a battle the the US really doesn’t want to get into, even though we’re obviously involved to some degree anyway. It’s really not clear that we wouldn’t be better off by simply abandoning the region. The main thing keeping us there is the oil supplied by the Gulf monarchies and global warming/climate change is a strong motivation to get ourselves off of fossil fuels anyway. The Saudi Arabians see the writing on the wall and have determined to get themselves out of the oil-supplying business during the 2020s.

No, we don’t need to send troops into the Mideast. We don’t need to throw US troops into a war against Daesh that Daesh has largely lost anyway and we really don’t want to “gin up” a conflict against Russian/Iranian forces.

Debate initial reaction

Liveblogging of the debate begins with FireDogLake, Daily Kos and Think Progress.
John McCain appears to want to keep all the old wars going AND to begin new ones! He thought the US should keep at it in Iraq. He thought that troops should be increased in Afghanistan. He was for defending Georgia against Russia, even though Georgia clearly started the fight (Obama unfortunately agreed with McCain even though he probably knows better). He even appeared to want to have Ukraine join NATO! The US is very heavily overstretched as it is. Exactly where does McCain expect to get the troops to do all this? Obviously, if the US population was willing to put up with a draft in any form, we would have seen that awhile ago.
McCain tried and tried to make the case that the "surge" in Iraq was a success and that the drop in violence owed nothing to factors that the US didn't control, but for anyone familiar with the arguments, that just didn't wash. Especially telling on that score was McCain's description of "clear, hold and build," a strategy that was tried many times, unsuccessfully, long before General Petraeus assumed command of US forces in Iraq.
McCain mentioned the former Bush policy of refusing to meet with bad international actors. Gives good summary of the idea, saying we don't wish to reward bad actors by legitimizing them (via publicly meeting them). Barack Obama correctly points out though, that the policy was a complete failure. Bush has begun to change it and even denounced John Bolton, who was very fond of that policy.
McCain's economic proposals sound a lot like Ronald Reagan's, and we all know how that "great deficit hawk" thing worked out! Deficits shot through the roof!

Good grief!

What do the dates April 2004, July 2005, June 2006 and June 2007 all have in common?

They've all seen US Government predictions that forces in Iraq could be reduced within a year.

Yeah, that'll happen, yup, this time for sure!