Robert Zubrin, Boulder
The Biden Administration is weighing an immoral policy of entrapping Russia in a Ukrainian bloodbath.
In an article published in the Washington Post December 19, foreign policy expert David Ignatius reports that the Biden administration is considering a strategy of allowing Putin to conquer Ukraine, and then afterward supplying Ukrainian insurgents with weapons, thereby trapping Russia in a bloody quagmire.
“The Biden administration is studying whether and how the United States could support an anti-Russian insurgency inside Ukraine if President Vladimir Putin invades that country and seizes substantial territory.
“The planning, described Sunday by a knowledgeable official, includes ways to provide weapons and other support to the Ukrainian military to resist invading Russian forces — and similar logistical support to insurgent groups if Russia topples the Ukrainian government and a guerrilla war begins…
“The administration task force, which includes the CIA and other key agencies, has been studying how insurgencies were organized against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Russian-backed forces in Syria—and also against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s an ironic example of turning the tables, weighing whether and how to inflict harm similar to what U.S. forces have suffered in recent years.”
The madness and sheer immorality of this policy defy polite description.
As historian John Keegan writes about the partisan conflict in Yugoslavia in his book The Second World War, stories of heroic resistance fighters stoically accepting retaliatory massacres of civilians by occupation forces in order to carry on with their raids “read well on the page,” the reality of such glorious tales is simply horrific. Ukraine has endured such circumstances before, both during the Nazi occupation and the Holodomor of the 1930s, when Soviet occupiers sought to crush Ukrainian aspirations by brutally enforcing the starvation of millions of people. Yet apparently such is the fate that the polished ladies and gentlemen of the Biden administration are willing to contemplate for Ukraine.
Ukraine is a civilized European nation comprised of people of talent and good will who wish to, and deserve to, become part of the free world. They are also a people that the United States has pledged its solemn word to protect. Those who propose to feed them to Russia so that once devoured they give the Kremlin indigestion should have no place in the US government.
Putin needs to wreck Ukraine so it can’t serve as an example to the Russian people of the benefits of freedom. Turning it once again into a wasteland of massacres and starvation would suit his purposes perfectly.
Instead of using Ukraine as bait in a meatgrinder trap, the US needs to help Ukraine draw the line at its border. The required measures include:
- Arming Ukraine to the teeth. Russian forces won’t be in position to invade for several more weeks. We need to take advantage of this time to ship the Ukrainians massive numbers of weapons, especially antiaircraft missiles. These are critically necessary to neutralize Russian air superiority. Unless that is done the Ukrainians will stand no chance of holding their ground on the battlefield. This needs to be done now, not after the Ukrainian army is destroyed by Russian air attacks. Once the invasion begins it will be too late.
- We need to act decisively to deter the invasion by placing demolition charges on the Nord Stream pipelines and announcing that, should the invasion begin, both pipelines will be instantly demolished. This could be readily done, as the Baltic is a shallow sea and the pipelines are well within reach of scuba divers. Such a course would no doubt annoy the Germans but that is just too bad. The pipelines were conceived as means of allowing Russia to continue to earn vital revenue by exporting gas to Germany while cutting off supplies to Ukraine and Poland. That is why in those countries they are commonly known as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pipelines,” after the pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that allowed those two countries to crush Poland and the Baltic states at the beginning of World War II. They are a project conceived with evil intent and deserve to be destroyed. Simply announcing such a policy would no doubt cause Nord Stream stock prices to tumble, which would be a useful shot across the bow to the Kremlin insiders and their western fifth column who own the shares. In any case, if by holding the pipelines hostage we can prevent the invasion and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people, and a conflict that could potentially escalate to global war, irritating a few Putin-allied German investors is a very small price to pay.
Good fences make good neighbors. By showing the enemy our back in Afghanistan, the Biden administration took down the fences that have secured general peace in Europe and Asia for the past seven decades. They need to be put back up again immediately. Then we can all be friends.
Deterrence is much better than war.
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Robert Zubrin, @robert_zubrin, an aerospace engineer, is the founder and president of Pioneer Astronautics. His latest book, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, was published by Prometheus Books.
I believe strongly that Robert’s idea of trying to damage or destroy NordStream 2 is dangerous and in fact the outcome of such an act would be worse for someone of Robert’s ideological predisposition(what I think he himself would describe as Anglo-American Atlanticism) and perhaps Claire’s too. Macron or really any French leader say a Valerie Pecresse would milk such an act for every last cent to build a “Gaullist” United States of Europe and would see then end of US Troops being based in Germany and basically see the end of any type of Atlanticist European Union.
Now as I have long said it is by belief that the battle between Thatcherite Anglo-Americanism and Gualllist Europeanism was lost by Margaret Thatcher and won by Kohl and Mitterand in the late 1980s/early 1990 during the debate over German reunification and the Maastricht Treaty it is only just now in the aftermath of Brexit we are coming to realize just how weak the Anglo-American position in Europe is. Now I have always been a bit of neo-Gaullist myself so this doesn’t bother me but if you are a self described Thatcherite like Robert is or even to a lesser extent Claire this should be ideologically devastating.
The perfect trifecta of stupid, naive, and un-proof-read.
Reads like the ramblings of a high school student writing an essay while high on pot for the first time.
As soon as you read about CIA involvement you know that it will be a total fiasco with a huge loss of life and the destruction of Ukraine as a country.
Dear Bob — Please tell me why the country of Russia is not in the Free World. You lose reasonable people when you go hysterical. We start reading your prose with a jaundiced eye.