Interesting thoughts. I thought, initially, you were going to make some connection between the Canadian Forces training methods - at the platoon level - for example, and the apparent success of the UA in holding off superior mechanized forces. Perhaps there's no connection and the war-fighting that's going on in the streets and towns of Ukraine is simply an artifact of better knowledge of local conditions and poor training on the Russian side. War is a complicated thing - almost never goes to plan.
To repeat James King's starting point above, this column is full of interesting thoughts.
I find that I am forced to think about things in a different fashion with this war. This column helps me put a framework on how I was flailing around (mentally, to be sure) trying to deal with those different things.
Thanks to the author for allowing me to better understand the absolute paucity of real, "true" (the definition of "truth" being questionable on all sides) information about this war - which I previously knew but did not have an adequate way of expressing it.
Thanks for these thoughts. Interestingly, some of them mirror those in a piece of poetry I wrote a couple of days ago from the perspective of a helpless civilian bystander on the other side of the world and observer of another kind of invasion happening right here in Canada: http://amazingsusan.com/2022/03/15/war-zones/
Can't follow this argument. Every war is an "everything" war. At least on the losing side. "It takes billions to win a war; to lose one, takes all you've got". The Middle East wars were certainly "everything" wars from the point of view of the other side, they were using every civilian resource, heavily using propaganda. The only way to see any war as military-only, planned, controlled, "operation" is to only watch the sanitized briefings that our side gave since Vietnam's "Five O'Clock Follies", sneered at for 55 years as rosy lies. (The Wars on Terror had awesome Five O'Clock Follies with giant TV screens.)
The only thing different about Ukraine from Iraq/Afghanistan is that this time, we're seeing the OTHER side of 'shock and awe'. Baghdad also had a lot of bombs hit civilians; we just weren't shown the footage, were were told that it was an unfortunate accident, and rare, our side using the most humanely accurate bombs.
The defending side uses every resource, causes maximum break-up of order, and this war, we're seeing their side. The messy, confusing one, with no Five O'Clock follies on how the precision planned operations went.
Hillier's version went no worse than the Col John Nagl "Counterinsurgency Manual" he did for Petraeus. They still lost.
I'm sorry, can you show me the evidence of where you think the US blew up an Iraqi children's hospital or some equivalent? or nuclear power plant or that equivalent? Or threatened the use of nukes if any other country intervenes in their war on terror?
Like the author said, the Ukraine war is a n-block war and the kinder, gentler, and in so being a massive failure - three block war didn't work then and certainly won't work now.
What part of Potter's argument are you disagreeing with?
Well, they deliberately bombed all the power plants, which Russia actually has not, yet. The dead power plants couldn't run the water plants. The Lancet estimated 170,000 children under the age of 5 died in the subsequent plagues of cholera and typhus. The article is about how the Pentagon did not dispute that number, and how the air tasking orders discussion made it clear that they were bombed after the Iraqi army had been reduced by 30 days of bombing; the explicit intention was not to win the war, but to "create leverage over the civilian population, post-war", i.e. to make them utterly desperate for any aid. That alone is a war crime, much less germ-warfare-by-proxy.
I disagree with Potter's suggestion that armies "doing everything" is new, or that civilians participating in conflict as killers, is new. Hell, Bogie and Hepburn decided to make "The African Queen" into a local asset of the Royal Navy, though I concede that was fictional. T.E. Lawrence's "irregulars" and civilian-villagers-also-VietCong, were not.
I will graciously concede that Americans never bombed an Iraqi nuclear plant; that was Israel, using American planes and bombs, and admittedly, the plant had no radioactives at the time, being half-constructed.
For their radioactive poisoning, probably worse than anything anybody got from Chernobyl, depended on the American dispersion of depleted-uranium bullets all around Iraq:
"The study now being published found an inverse relationship between the distance one lived from Tallil Air Base and the risk of birth defects as well as of levels of thorium and uranium in one’s hair"
...I can't recommend the article. Hugely informative, but the pictures of the deformed Iraqi babies from near that base - and they insist you "don't turn away" - were the most horrible thing I've seen in the last month, and I've watched every second of Ukraine coverage on every channel.
I'm going to stop now, dude, though I could literally go on all day. Letting people know about the myths they've absorbed is why I comment so much here; it's the underlying assumptions in the articles, not the articles, that gall me.
Re the myths people are told or invent themselves. I agree and it happens everywhere. The more I listen to people like Applebaum and Timothy Snyder to name two, the more I see the problems it creates. As Snyder says, the USA sees Hitler and Stalin largely from how it affected them, and not how the individual people especially in eastern Europe have seen it.
Opening line: US aircraft hit a Red Crescent maternity hospital in Baghdad, the city's trade fair, and other civilian buildings today, killing several people and wounding at least 25, hospital sources and a Reuters witness said.
A more-harshly-worded journalistic effort from 2016:
"The U.S. military said Thursday that it intentionally bombed a hospital in Mosul, Iraq as part of its efforts to "eradicate" Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.
The attack on the Al Salam hospital complex took place Wednesday at the request of Iraqi forces, with coalition aircraft using "precision-guided munitions," Air Force Col. John Dorrian, "
...the Iraqis claimed ISIS was firing from the hospital. Our "allies" in Afghanistan said the same stuff about whichever narco-gang they were trying to compete with. Taking "allies" word for whom your enemies are was not a good idea.
The superpowers can't attack each other, but they can attack anybody else. That was the "New World Order", as of 1948, when the UN was explicitly designed to make war illegal, that everybody would immediately defend any invadee against the aggressive invader...as long as no nuclear power vetoed.
There might have been a New World Order in 2003, if the whole world had sanctioned the USA for the illegality of Iraq (under UN Charter, no member state may attack another, and the UN denied Colin Powell legal permission)...but we didn't. It would have been insanely expensive and damaging to, well, the world order.
It will be far better proof that war won't work any more, for Russia or China, to see Russia's economy crushed, than their army. Then we need to start hardening our own economy enough to provide a meaningful economic threat to China, the way we are not, now. And, everybody should read Anne Applbaum in The Atlantic, the article that was basically her Congressional testimony the other day, about how we have to get rid of all the tolerance and enablement of all oligarch money, not just Russian. Hit the Chinese oligarchs now, just as a shot across the bow. Anne might just point the way to a real "New World Order", where rich crooks are no longer in power, over the bad guys, or us.
Thanks for this perspective. Unfortunately, I was unable to access the Atlantic article (not a subscriber), but I did find this interview with her on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5Y99z5TJPI
Thanks for the link and the compliment :) My poetry is almost all rhyming couplets (or à la Dr. Seuss). It's fun to write. I wrote another today on the same theme. I'll send it along after I post it.
Interesting thoughts. I thought, initially, you were going to make some connection between the Canadian Forces training methods - at the platoon level - for example, and the apparent success of the UA in holding off superior mechanized forces. Perhaps there's no connection and the war-fighting that's going on in the streets and towns of Ukraine is simply an artifact of better knowledge of local conditions and poor training on the Russian side. War is a complicated thing - almost never goes to plan.
To repeat James King's starting point above, this column is full of interesting thoughts.
I find that I am forced to think about things in a different fashion with this war. This column helps me put a framework on how I was flailing around (mentally, to be sure) trying to deal with those different things.
Thanks to the author for allowing me to better understand the absolute paucity of real, "true" (the definition of "truth" being questionable on all sides) information about this war - which I previously knew but did not have an adequate way of expressing it.
Always enjoy reading Andrew Potter.
Thanks for these thoughts. Interestingly, some of them mirror those in a piece of poetry I wrote a couple of days ago from the perspective of a helpless civilian bystander on the other side of the world and observer of another kind of invasion happening right here in Canada: http://amazingsusan.com/2022/03/15/war-zones/
I admire people who can write poetry. Thank you!
Thank YOU :)
Can't follow this argument. Every war is an "everything" war. At least on the losing side. "It takes billions to win a war; to lose one, takes all you've got". The Middle East wars were certainly "everything" wars from the point of view of the other side, they were using every civilian resource, heavily using propaganda. The only way to see any war as military-only, planned, controlled, "operation" is to only watch the sanitized briefings that our side gave since Vietnam's "Five O'Clock Follies", sneered at for 55 years as rosy lies. (The Wars on Terror had awesome Five O'Clock Follies with giant TV screens.)
The only thing different about Ukraine from Iraq/Afghanistan is that this time, we're seeing the OTHER side of 'shock and awe'. Baghdad also had a lot of bombs hit civilians; we just weren't shown the footage, were were told that it was an unfortunate accident, and rare, our side using the most humanely accurate bombs.
The defending side uses every resource, causes maximum break-up of order, and this war, we're seeing their side. The messy, confusing one, with no Five O'Clock follies on how the precision planned operations went.
Hillier's version went no worse than the Col John Nagl "Counterinsurgency Manual" he did for Petraeus. They still lost.
I'm sorry, can you show me the evidence of where you think the US blew up an Iraqi children's hospital or some equivalent? or nuclear power plant or that equivalent? Or threatened the use of nukes if any other country intervenes in their war on terror?
Like the author said, the Ukraine war is a n-block war and the kinder, gentler, and in so being a massive failure - three block war didn't work then and certainly won't work now.
What part of Potter's argument are you disagreeing with?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/06/23/allied-air-war-struck-broadly-in-iraq/e469877b-b1c1-44a9-bfe7-084da4e38e41/
Well, they deliberately bombed all the power plants, which Russia actually has not, yet. The dead power plants couldn't run the water plants. The Lancet estimated 170,000 children under the age of 5 died in the subsequent plagues of cholera and typhus. The article is about how the Pentagon did not dispute that number, and how the air tasking orders discussion made it clear that they were bombed after the Iraqi army had been reduced by 30 days of bombing; the explicit intention was not to win the war, but to "create leverage over the civilian population, post-war", i.e. to make them utterly desperate for any aid. That alone is a war crime, much less germ-warfare-by-proxy.
I disagree with Potter's suggestion that armies "doing everything" is new, or that civilians participating in conflict as killers, is new. Hell, Bogie and Hepburn decided to make "The African Queen" into a local asset of the Royal Navy, though I concede that was fictional. T.E. Lawrence's "irregulars" and civilian-villagers-also-VietCong, were not.
I will graciously concede that Americans never bombed an Iraqi nuclear plant; that was Israel, using American planes and bombs, and admittedly, the plant had no radioactives at the time, being half-constructed.
For their radioactive poisoning, probably worse than anything anybody got from Chernobyl, depended on the American dispersion of depleted-uranium bullets all around Iraq:
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/09/21/new-study-documents-depleted-uranium-impacts-on-children-in-iraq/
"The study now being published found an inverse relationship between the distance one lived from Tallil Air Base and the risk of birth defects as well as of levels of thorium and uranium in one’s hair"
...I can't recommend the article. Hugely informative, but the pictures of the deformed Iraqi babies from near that base - and they insist you "don't turn away" - were the most horrible thing I've seen in the last month, and I've watched every second of Ukraine coverage on every channel.
I'm going to stop now, dude, though I could literally go on all day. Letting people know about the myths they've absorbed is why I comment so much here; it's the underlying assumptions in the articles, not the articles, that gall me.
Re the myths people are told or invent themselves. I agree and it happens everywhere. The more I listen to people like Applebaum and Timothy Snyder to name two, the more I see the problems it creates. As Snyder says, the USA sees Hitler and Stalin largely from how it affected them, and not how the individual people especially in eastern Europe have seen it.
That last (below) was the 1991 Gulf War. This is 2003.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/02/iraq.simonjeffery
Opening line: US aircraft hit a Red Crescent maternity hospital in Baghdad, the city's trade fair, and other civilian buildings today, killing several people and wounding at least 25, hospital sources and a Reuters witness said.
A more-harshly-worded journalistic effort from 2016:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/09/us-military-admits-we-deliberately-bombed-hospital-iraq
"The U.S. military said Thursday that it intentionally bombed a hospital in Mosul, Iraq as part of its efforts to "eradicate" Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.
The attack on the Al Salam hospital complex took place Wednesday at the request of Iraqi forces, with coalition aircraft using "precision-guided munitions," Air Force Col. John Dorrian, "
...the Iraqis claimed ISIS was firing from the hospital. Our "allies" in Afghanistan said the same stuff about whichever narco-gang they were trying to compete with. Taking "allies" word for whom your enemies are was not a good idea.
The superpowers can't attack each other, but they can attack anybody else. That was the "New World Order", as of 1948, when the UN was explicitly designed to make war illegal, that everybody would immediately defend any invadee against the aggressive invader...as long as no nuclear power vetoed.
There might have been a New World Order in 2003, if the whole world had sanctioned the USA for the illegality of Iraq (under UN Charter, no member state may attack another, and the UN denied Colin Powell legal permission)...but we didn't. It would have been insanely expensive and damaging to, well, the world order.
It will be far better proof that war won't work any more, for Russia or China, to see Russia's economy crushed, than their army. Then we need to start hardening our own economy enough to provide a meaningful economic threat to China, the way we are not, now. And, everybody should read Anne Applbaum in The Atlantic, the article that was basically her Congressional testimony the other day, about how we have to get rid of all the tolerance and enablement of all oligarch money, not just Russian. Hit the Chinese oligarchs now, just as a shot across the bow. Anne might just point the way to a real "New World Order", where rich crooks are no longer in power, over the bad guys, or us.
Thanks for this perspective. Unfortunately, I was unable to access the Atlantic article (not a subscriber), but I did find this interview with her on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5Y99z5TJPI
Apologies; since it was also congressional testimony, it's free there:
https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/031522_Applebaum_Testimony.pdf
I liked your poem. Rhyming couplets, almost a forgotten form.
Thanks for the link and the compliment :) My poetry is almost all rhyming couplets (or à la Dr. Seuss). It's fun to write. I wrote another today on the same theme. I'll send it along after I post it.