VIEWPOINT / ACTING NOW IS MORALLY RIGHT. NOT ACTING IS MORALLY WRONG

By W. Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

Forgive me for sounding a lot like Dean Rusk and Paul Nitze, but it has become simple for me. I’m with Stevie van Zandt! I’m with Garry Kasparov! What will Russia do if we and NATO stop the Russian convoys from surrounding and leveling Kyiv? Are they going to randomly fire off nukes? At whom? Western leaders have bought into this BS long enough. Fear of the big bad bear? I wrote these lines in college in the 1960s: “Helter, shelter, skelter. Who is afraid of the big bad bear?” This kind of existential fear-based propaganda started when I was a child. It followed me though college. It was propaganda then and it is today. 

Sadly, with time it has become doctrine. “Never do anything to rattle the Russian military. They’ll annihilate us! “ Time has come to act. Putin has declared the war. They are on foreign soil with the intent to execute a duly elected head of state. Would we tolerate this in Canada? Mexico? They are showing no mercy. They are destroying residential buildings. They are committing war crimes our government refuses to acknowledge. The Ukrainians are spelling it out with blood. I am becoming disgusted as I watch Putin’s prophecy be borne out by the west. Weak. Afraid. He has used this approach successfully for decades while destroying untold lives. We can and therefore we must stop this madman.

As the Ukrainian MP asked of Biden & Harris–what is your redline? I understand the reasoning behind Biden’s stance. But what happens when Putin brings tactical nukes into Ukraine? Surrounds and then carpet bombs Ukrainian cities as he did against Syrians in Aleppo and Chechens in Grozny. Russian rules of engagement do not exclude battlefield use of nukes when threatened, not just when there is an existential threat to the homeland as is the case with America. Apparently, targeting residential apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, clinics and nursing homes is not an American redline. 

We can send MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, the Army’s upgraded version of the Predator system, and the successor to the Army’s MQ-1 Warrior. It can carry four Hellfire missiles and stay aloft as long as 25 hours. These drones would provide a protection to the Ukrainians no other weapon could match. Now, they are stuck with less than a dozen Turkish drones. We don’t need American or NATO pilots in the air to protect Ukrainian forces and keep corridors open. We have drones in forward positions. No American personnel in secret US drone centers are going to be threatened. Afterall, Russia is the threat. Putin has invaded another country that was no threat to Russia simply because Putin wanted to do so. Purely hatred, Stalin’s reason. No other reason. 

Russian troops are not in Russia now. They are on Ukrainian soil, not Russian soil. That to me is the rationale for coming to the assistance of a friendly Ukraine literally begging us for help. We have as much right to be there as Russia. More, because we are being invited. I will be heartbroken if Biden continues with his inherited and grossly exaggerated fear of Putin. Isn’t that why we have the strongest military in the world, costing us more than all of the other countries in the world combined? Our cause here is righteous. I just hate that I am seeing us standby and permit the devastation of cities and mass civilian casualties.

The reason I said, “inherited fear,” is that all post-Kennedy presidents, except Reagan, have held back from preventing humanitarian disasters when Russia is the perpetrator. Syria is a classic example and lies at Obama’s feet. He flat out refused to use American power to create a no fly zone over northern Syria. I will say that we reluctantly and in a delayed fashion finally became involved in Kosovo but too late to prevent atrocities. Recall that Russia was not involved. 

In Syria Putin dared us, threatened dire consequences if we intervened. Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said, “I think we fundamentally will not allow this scenario,” referring to an American no-fly zone. Obama expressed skepticism that it would help. Instead, we not only didn’t help but ran continuous footage of the total destruction of Aleppo and the killing of Kurds as they fled to the Turkish border where they were trapped. 

Part of the killing rests with Trump after he betrayed the Kurds and removed American troops altogether from the region at the encouragement of Russia and Turkey. Recall that Putin publicly applauded Trump’s decision. Brett McGurk, the former US envoy to the global coalition against the Islamic State resigned over Trump’s attempts to withdraw from Syria. As a result, it is estimated that 130,000 Kurdish families were displaced and hundreds were killed when Turkey invaded northern Syria and Asaad pushed northward with Russian help. It is not clear whether Putin told Trump to do it but the pretext was that Turkey would attack us. Turkey? The US has an air force 7 times larger than Turkey, we have 178 times more attack helicopters, twice the number of battle tanks and we spend 27 times more than Turkey on our military. The US Navy has 71 nuclear submarines and 10 aircraft carriers. Turkey has none. Turkey, attack the United States?

This much is clear. Thousands of Syrians died in northern Syria as a result of American inaction, a great many of those in Aleppo, and an equal number still suffer. As a result, the huge metro area of Aleppo, 4.6 million people, was incinerated, with tens of thousands killed. Our redline allowed hospitals, kindergartens, all schools, clinics, nursing homes, churches and mosques, and residential buildings to be targeted and destroyed. We seem to have had no reluctance to put boots on the ground in the Middle East when it involves us and our direct interests. Not much oil in Syria. But, when it comes to a purely humanitarian cause, we are frozen in place by the fear of Putin.

The odds of Russia or anyone else firing a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile is impossibly low. It really is time to stop being afraid of this monster. Without firing a single shot, Putin kept us from intervening with a no-fly zone over northern Syria. He blocked the entire western world when he annexed Crimea, simply by blustering. In scope that would be like Canada annexing half of Montana without us uttering a peep. 

He did the same in the Donbas which would be in its entirety like Mexico annexing a chunk of New Mexico. We in the west were frozen with fear, hiding behind, “Ukraine is not part of NATO.” The reason Ukraine’s not in NATO is fear of Putin, fear that it might upset him, fear of his redline. I hid under desks in elementary school. The Russian scare is approaching its 8th decade. If we allow this to continue, none of the old Soviet republics will retain even a modicum of independence. If he successfully destroys Ukraine as a sovereign nation, he will be emboldened to continue his empire building. My attitude about this has changed radically. I guess I should have avoided watching what is happening in Ukraine on television. Now, I can never un-watch it. 

Let me put the argument a slightly different way. Putin and his inner circle apparently have a calculus for dealing with the US and the west. From their actions over the years, we can draw conclusions. Those actions include downing a Malaysian airliner, Flight 17, over eastern Ukraine in 2014, and a Korean airliner, Flight 007, in 1983 killing all aboard in both cases. Those actions included also the invasion of Georgia in 2008 (Russia still occupies 20% with military), invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and pulling the iron curtain around Belarus even though Belarus declared its independence in 1991. Putin shows zero fear of the west. He brazenly invaded a neutral nation–thumbing his nose at NATO and the US. He is certain we are cowed by the big bad bear. He is right.

The Russians apparently have a locked-in assumption behind these actions: that we would never use nuclear weapons, although, ironically we are the only nation to have done so, and we would not get involved out of fear they might. 

They also must be including in their doctrine the assumption that we are far, far more afraid of what they might do, than they are of what we might do. I say this, ipso facto, when they can march an army of 190,000 into another country with impunity. And, yet given all of our exaggerated fears, Khrushchev turned around his nuclear missiles that were enroute to Cuba, after Kennedy threatened him. According to U.S. Government Archives, U.S. forces around the world were placed on alert. Four tactical air squadrons were readied for air strikes over Cuba, with missile sites, airfields, ports, and gun emplacements as their potential targets. More than 100,000 troops were sent to Florida for a possible invasion of Cuba. The navy dispatched 180 vessels into the Caribbean for a planned amphibious exercise involving 40,000 marines. B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons were in the air at all times.

Kennedy, then read the following statement to the American people: 

“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, from whatever nation or port, will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. 

I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. . . . He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.” 

Khrushchev backed down.

Yes. It is true this all took place at a different time and 90 miles from the US mainland. It was our backyard. The Caribbean since the Monroe Doctrine has been part of the American sphere of influence. But, the world has changed. NATO has become a force in Europe. The old Soviet world is no more. The eastern bloc countries are now part of the EU. We are directly involved in eastern Europe whether we like it or not. The Warsaw Pact no longer exists. This is the new world. Ukraine IS our backyard now. It is more than time to acknowledge that the old European empires cannot be reconstituted and Europe, to the Russian border, is free. 

In my view, we have misjudged Russia for all the decades since Kennedy and in doing so we have allowed them to construct a one-sided doctrine in which they do what they want, and we are afraid to stop them. 

Time to once again rethink American foreign policy with regard to Russia. We need to confront them and stop them—now.

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