Resolve as a Precious Commodity

The news of Putin’s invasion (and it is HIS invasion, more than it is Russia’s) was gut-wrenching.  Especially so because I think we would be doing more to stop it if we hadn’t spent our resolve in another war we started decades before. s before.  

Going to wary is a scary, horrifying, decision to make.  It should always be a decision of last resort.  The last thing tried to resolve a political problem with another country.  Some done with extreme reluctance.  

Sometimes, I’ll even say rarely, there come times when it’s the only choice to be made.  I thought that way back in 2001.  This was after the towers fell and the perpetrators were identified as a group of terrorists based in a country somewhere on the other side of the planet.  It’s an axiom of international politics that if you allow an enemy to strike at you with impunity, then they would do so again, with greater force, and keep doing so until you stopped them.   

When the Taliban government ruling Afghanistan refused to hand over Al Qaida, they had to be dealt with.  They made themselves accomplices after the fact to the greatest criminal act perpetrated in modern history.  They had to pay.  

It may sound like I was gung-ho about the prospect.  I wasn’t.  I remembered how scary it was when my little brother went into Kuwait during a previous conflict, which I also regarded as necessary.  But I accepted the axiom as valid and applicable.  And I hoped that those we of the body politic had put in charge had the same clarity of purpose, and clearly stated goals as their predecessors had.  

At first, it looked like they did.  Afghanistan started as a relatively limited operation.  About twenty thousand troops.  Mostly special operations units, air support, and intelligence teams, allying themselves with a native group already fighting the Taliban, the Northern Alliance.  We gave them arms, information, and training to help them break the stalemate in their fight with our now common enemy, while we started hunting down those that had attacked us.  In relatively short order, they took Kabul, we brought in more people to help them set up a government to legitimize themselves, and we tracked down Al Qaida.  

Then, the sideshow took over.  Based on an assumed connection I even heard repeated in popular entertainment (“You’re crazy if you think he had nothing to do with it”), using “evidence” that proved to be flimsy at best, and maybe even fabricated, and hyped to the public with statements that underscored the crassness of the real reasons and objectives of this expansion of conflict(“The war will pay for itself”).  We invaded Iraq.  Something which the father of the then current president refused to do despite pressure for within his own party because it wasn’t “prudent.”  

History has proven H.W. Bush to have been right.  It became the quagmire that Dick Cheney, as Defense Secretary under Bush #1, warned it would become had we gone on from Kuwait to head toward Baghdad.  Too bad he couldn’t remember saying that when he became Vice President.    

And it drained us.  Of lives, money, resources that could have been used to conclude our operations in Afghanistan successfully (and by “successfully” I mean something more than a thinly veiled cover to allow us to get out without too much embarrassment, which is what success eventually came to mean).  More importantly, it drained us, the American people, of resolve.  Collectively we reached the point where we just wanted it to end.  No matter the result.  

While we were dealing with the mess we’d created, Russia was rebuilding itself.  Or, more accurately, Putin was rebuilding Russia in his own image.  Gathering power internally.  And recreating the modern version of the Soviet Union (the fall of which he laments as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century).  In Georgia.  In Belarus.  In Syria, after we drew a “red line in the sand” that was promptly crossed and forgotten.  And then in Ukraine, in 2014, after a democratically elected government not to his liking (and what democratically elected government could ever be to his liking?) came to power on his doorstep.  Threatening to provide sharp contrast to his failure to create a better life for his people and country.  

Putin has done what he has done because he could see what we were willing to do, or more importantly, not do.  We’ve even saying it every time we announce new sanctions were going to apply against him.  After a listing all the stern action we will take, along with the assurances that he will “pay a cost” for what he has done, there always follows the almost obligatory statement of, “but we won’t be sending troops into Ukraine.”  

That’s the part he’s hearing.  Putin has been under sanctions already.  He’s learned to deal with them.  He’s built up a fund to get through this.  It’s the only part of what the West is saying that he is paying attention to.  He hears, “Blah-ba-blah-ba-blah-blah-blah, we’re not sending troops” and turns to his generals and says, “they’re not going to stop us.  Go ahead.” 

The Zeitgeist of this age is a scary one.  There appear to be a fresh crop of “Bad Guys” running countries.  The ones gaining power for themselves.  The ones telling obvious lies.  Lies so obvious they’re the equivalent of pointing at the noontime sun and saying it’s the moon at midnight.  The ones reaching out to take more and more of what they can get. 

Then there’s “The Rest of Us.”  The ones watching all this happen, shaking our heads in horrified disbelief.  Some of the Rest of Us are, like those in Hong Kong, are seeing what they thought were their rights being torn up and discarded.  Some of the Rest of Us are now picking up weapons as the Bad Guys send tanks and troops across their borders.  And other Rest of Us, like those living in Taiwan, are looking at their calendars wondering when it’ll happen to them. 

I’m remembering old newsreel images of Prime Minister Chamberlain of Great Britain, holding a sheet of paper that was dancing in the wind, declaring he had secured “peace for our time.”  This was in 1938, after returning from Munich, Germany, where he’d rubber-stamped Hitler’s annexation of the Sudentenland of Czechoslovakia.

I am not drawing a comparison with Chamberlain with Biden or any other leader working to stop Putin from going further.  I am thinking it’s an example of what can happen if you allow a lack of resolve to keep you from doing what should be done.