No Attaboy for Uncle Sam…he just ran out of ATACMS

No Attaboy for Uncle Sam…he just ran out of ATACMS

Back in 2022 the US was all in throwing tens of billions in US weapons to Ukraine to fuel the US proxy war against Russia.

At the time the US had plenty of tactical surface to surface missiles known as ATACMS to lavish on Ukraine to clobber the hated Russians. The US was just fine using Ukraine as a Trojan horse to weaken if not destroy Russia as long as Ukraine did all the dying while Americans shed not a drop of blood.

Four had a half years on Ukraine is a shattered land on life support. Millions dead, fled, injured. A fifth of its land gone forever. It’s access to the Black Sea port kaput. It’s military near collapse.

And the US not faring so well either. Just a week after the four year anniversary of the proxy war President Biden provoked, his successor Trump launched a deranged, criminal ear on Iran at the behest of Israel that was lost on day one. Trump bombed Iran furiously for 39 days then stopped abruptly.

Why? He was informed that the missile cupboard of offensive ATACMS and the newer Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) were nearly depleted, in part from squandering them on the lost cause of the Ukraine proxy war.

Adding to America’s offensive missile woes, it has depleted over 60 % of Patriot defensive interceptors and half of its THAAD interceptors. No wonder Iran has decimated every one of America’s 18 Gulf State bases. No wonder Trump dare not attack Iran again in force least Iran wipe out Gulf State oil infrastructure sending the world economy into collapse.

America under the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again war machine does well against small powerless states like Serbia, Libya, Somalia and Venezuela. But try to defeat formidable foes like Russia and Iran? America’s trillion dollar war machine collapses into chaos. No attaboy for the murderous American military bombing 7 or more countries worldwide for no reason at all.

Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glemn Ellyn IL

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Understanding complexities of Ukraine war vital to achieving peace

 Understanding complexities of Ukraine war vital to achieving peace

Lidia Pilecky, in her Chicago Tribune commentary ‘Ukraine has always been here — and always will be’ is correct that Ukraine will always exist.

However, four and a half years of unnecessary war have reduced it to a rump state that is a shadow of its prewar self with little or no chance of regaining its prewar status in size, population and economy. A quarter of its prewar population is gone along with a fifth of its territory. Russian attacks on Ukraine Black Sea ports have largely shut down vital Ukraine grain exports greatly worsening Ukraine’s economic decline. Ukraine faces becoming a land locked rump state.

All this could have been avoided had Ukraine not agreed to accept US and NATO entreaties to join NATO beginning in 2008. This was a NATO encroachment too far for Russia which viewed it as an effort to isolate Russia from the European political economy and advance NATO nukes to Russia’s border. Preventing that was analogous to JFK risking nuclear war to prevent Russia from putting nukes 90 miles from America’s borders in 1962.

The Ukraine crisis worsened when the US, to further its ties with Ukraine, supported Kyiv’s coup to oust its Russian leaning president Victor Yanukovych in 2014. This precipitated a civil war with Russian leaning Ukrainians in the Russian bordering Donbas whose culture was being systematically degraded by Kyiv nationalists. Thousands were killed and Kyiv was poised to finish off the remaining Ukrainian separatists when Russia intervened February 24, 2022.

Hundreds of billions in US and NATO weaponry have not prevented Ukraine’s massive destruction and likely capitulation to a much larger, much stronger opponent. Astoundingly, the war could have been ended within the first two months had not the US and UK not intervened to prevent Ukraine President Zelensky from signing the Istanbul Accords to end the war with Russia losing no new territory. That represented a catastrophic US, NATO, Kyiv miscalculation,

Everyone seeking peace in Ukraine should empathize with Ukrainians supporting the Ukrainian cause. But only diplomacy, not hundreds of billions in additional weaponry will bring that about. Understanding the underlying conditions that both led to the war and that can lead to a diplomatic solution are critical to ending the bloodshed and achieving peace.

Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn

After 157 days of Iran war failure, Trump must quit war or quit presidency

 After 157 days of Iran war failure, Trump must quit war or quit presidency

President Trump is flailing around like every world leader in history who launched a criminal war of choice he can't win but can’t quit. Like every losing criminal war predecessor, he’s becoming more and more unhinged searching for a magic bullet, make that a magic missile, that will turn his inevitable defeat into his cherished victory.

He fantasizes Iran has been destroyed and is begging to surrender in Trump’s terms. He threatens massive destruction one day, then calls off that destruction a day later for two reasons: he doesn’t have the firepower to inflict it, and knows Iran will inflict even worse damage to US Gulf State bases and Middle East energy infrastructure cratering the world economy. Thousands more Iranians may die and hundreds more US service casualties may pile up to no avail.

Iran won, the US has lost. Deservedly so. Iran did nothing to deserve Trump’s dastardly attack.

Except for a dwindling number of ‘destroy Iran dead enders’, Trump’s war cabinet must be apoplectic over Trump’s delusional descent into endless war madness. Neither VP Vance nor Secretary of State Rubio were keen on Trump’s cockamamie war but bowed to his hubris fueled by the power behind the push for war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On this war day 157 of Trump’s disastrous, failed war edging the world economy toward the fiscal cliff, Trump still has 900 days to ensure that happens. On his own he appears incapable of admitting defeat or simply resigning the presidency to allow Vance to begin negotiations to end the war on Iran’s sensible terms. We can only hope Trump’s was council will conduct an intervention. Instruct Trump to quit the war or quit the presidency. If not they should threaten resignation en mass to paralyze the government to fulfill the prophesy Bob Dylan once famously sang.... “Even the President of the United States sometimes has to stand naked.”

Walr Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL

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Many top military leaders opposed atomic bombings

 Many top military leaders opposed atomic bombings

 

Every year the four day period August 6 – 9 brings to mind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. This year marks the 81th anniversary of those horrific acts.  We may be closer to nukes fired in anger at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis 64 tears ago. Major wars in Ukraine and Iran could both devolve into nuclear war. U.S. withdrawal from several nuclear treaties and planning to spend a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear stockpile add to nuclear anxiety. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight in January, the closest it's been set to nuclear winter in the entire nuclear age.

I learned of the atomic bombings 75 years ago at age 6 and have been haunted by them ever since. For the first decade or so afterward I swallowed whole the US fairytale that the military and political elite were unified in dropping the bombs to prevent a U.S. invasion and its estimate of a million U.S. casualties. A little research disabused me of that false narrative designed to justify the unjustifiable. 

Few if any reputable historians buy that version today. They point to a number of top military leaders who opposed the nuclear attacks, for good reasons. Most prominent was U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall who argued not using the Bomb would strengthen America’s prestige and position in post war Asia. He even advocated for inviting the Russians to view our July 16, 1945 test. Navy Secretary and later Defense Secretary James Forrestal argued the bombings would impede our post WWII relations with the Soviet Union. Fleet Admiral William Leahy, senior US military officer on active duty in WWII, called the proposed bombings “barbaric”. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy told Truman that neither invasion nor atomic bombings were necessary. Japan would surrender if we avoided terminology ‘Unconditional Surrender’ since any surrender would amount to that without saying so. Allowing Hirohito to remain Emperor would bolster that view. McCloy even advocated telling Japanese leaders we had the Bomb as additional incentive to quit the war.

Tho not involved in the Bomb decision process, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was furious we dropped them, telling Secretary of War Harry Stimson shortly after the attacks “I voiced my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.” Japanese leaders never admitted US atomic bombings motivated their surrender.  More likely it was the massive Russian invasion of Manchuria the day of the Nagasaki bombing that more motivated the Japanese surrender. 

Ike, McCloy, Leahy, Forristall, Marshall and others were right; Truman and his supporters were wrong. Eighty-one years on America is still the only country to explode nukes in anger. Current senseless wars in Ukraine and Iran, refusal to maintain critically needed nuclear agreements, routinely threatening imagined enemies with “all military options are on the table”, spending a trillion dollars to build bigger and better nukes, all bode ill we’ll make another 81 years nuclear attack free.

Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glan Ellyn IL