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The Repercussions of an Assassination Policy
Russia is on the cusp of breaking apart, with each region/nation/tribe going its own way. The country’s army has been exposed, and its finest assets dashed on the Ukrainian rocks, leaving a thin veneer of central government authority backed with no real threat of military power. It stands to reason that more independently-minded regions will cut ties with Moscow.
There is really only one thing keeping any would-be secessionist leader from breaking away: Putin’s track record of murdering any who oppose him. His policy of assassinating dissenters of all kinds has been extremely effective, because it is clear to any Russian national (in or out of Russia) that even voicing the wrong opinion can lead to polonium in your coffee or unhealthy deceleration after a brief encounter with unrestrained gravity.
On the one hand, I abhor murdering people for merely exercising their power of speech. But from a strategic and historic perspective, it is intriguing: murdering people really seems to be working for Vlad and his goals.
Sure, there are downsides in the long run for Russia: anyone who can get out, does. This has been broadly true since 1990, with a burst of 2022 acceleration in emigration and flight. The long-term drain on human resources will doom Mother Russia in the end. But is that end 2023, or 2030, or later?
So is assassination a legitimate/productive policy for a government? I have long advocated the US targeting leaders instead of foot soldiers: if we could, for example, take out Iran’s leadership in one strike it would seem to have all kinds of net benefits. I still think this is true — but only for very specific and evil foreign enemies.
Yet I fear an American government that is capable of targeting individuals overseas is also capable of following Putin’s lead and murdering our own citizens. We have plenty of targeting already going on (the IRS, FBI, etc., are all demonstratively capable of political witchhunts). We would not sleep better at night knowing that federal agencies might keep going down this path of illegal targeting of civilians.
What think you?
Published in General
Go back to your predictions early in this war, Oh Wise One.
You have been consistently wrong thus far. If you are man enough to admit it, then there is a pathway to redemption.
Play the ball, not the pitcher.
Are you saying those quotes are false or made up?
newsflash MacGregor has prophesied the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian army every other month since the war began…
studying military history for 25 years and apparently learning very little…
added-for instance: weren’t you one of those claiming the weapons being handed out in Kyiv at the start of the war were all going to street gangs to settle old scores? I guess they had old scores to settle with the VDV.
A very strange opinion considering that nearly one-million people have exited Russia since the start of the invasion. How do you explain the huge numbers of Russians protesting against the war?
I’ve heard of Putin apologists before but this is just willful blindness. All my life I have been puzzled by the people who believe the words of communist dictators and dictators of any sort. It is a naivete that just boggles the mind.
Looks like Douglas MacGregor declared just three weeks after the war had started that “The war is really over for the Ukrainians. They have been grounded to bits. There’s no question about that, despite what we report on our mainstream media.” He could co-write a book on predictions with Paul Ehrlich.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/03/18/col-douglas-macgregor-the-war-is-really-over-in-ukraine-they-have-been-grounded-to-bits-1214181/
And yet, crickets from @torywarwriter.
When I get things wrong, I come back and say so. Why doesn’t everyone? Aren’t we all trying to learn from our experience?
I don’t always read all the comments. I didn’t here. Sorry.
https://www.sott.net/article/466340-Retired-Swiss-Military-Intelligence-Officer-Is-it-Possible-to-Actually-Know-What-Has-Been-And-is-Going-on-in-Ukraine?ysclid=ld3no9p3ru960443253
From the above article that is the work of a Swiss observer of the Ukraine situation, going back some 8 years. In terms of copyright, for purposes of information and education, the following material is considered public domain:
For years, from Mali to Afghanistan, I have worked for peace and risked my life for it. It is therefore not a question of justifying war, but of understanding what led us to it.
Let’s try to examine the roots of the Ukrainian conflict. It starts with those who for the last 8 years have been talking about “separatists” or “independentists” from Donbass. This is a misnomer. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность). The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case. The term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
In fact, these Republics were not seeking to separate from Ukraine, but to have a status of autonomy, guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language — because the 1st legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on Feb 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine. SNIP
This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. The result was fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions. Also confiscation of small arms. So we were trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels, to see if Moscow was involved. The info we received came almost entirely from Polish intel services & did not “fit” with the info coming from the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] — and despite rather crude allegations, there were no deliveries of weapons and military equipment from Russia.
The rebels were armed thanks to the defection of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that went over to the rebel side. As Ukrainian failures continued, tank, artillery & anti-aircraft battalions swelled ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushed the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Agreements.
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@undergroundconservative
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Sidebar by editor at Sign Of the Times:
Comment: That is astonishing. Even we assumed they were getting at least some Russian weapons. After all, Western media harped on about ‘the Russian invasion of Ukraine’ from Day One of Kiev’s ‘anti-terror operation’ in the Donbass. It just goes to show that, if you really want freedom, you’ve got to really fight for it, and on your own for the most part…
Back to the article:But just after signing the Minsk 1 Agreements, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive “anti-terrorist operation”
(Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which was carried out beginning in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some horrific massacres of the Russian population (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most notable).
At this stage, too rigid and engrossed in a doctrinaire approach to operations, the Ukrainian general staff subdued the enemy but without managing to actually prevail. The war waged by the autonomists consisted in highly mobile operations conducted with light means.
With a more flexible and less doctrinaire approach, the rebels were able to exploit the inertia of Ukrainian forces to repeatedly “trap” them.
SNIP
But just after signing the Minsk 1 Agreements, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a massive “anti-terrorist operation” (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass. Poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo, which forced them to engage in the Minsk 2 Agreements.
It is essential to recall here that Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements did not provide for the separation or independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. Those who have read the Agreements (there are few who actually have) will note that it is written that the status of the Republics was to be negotiated between Kiev & the representatives of the Republics, for an internal solution within Ukraine.
That is why, since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded the implementation of the Minsk Agreements while refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal matter of Ukraine. On the other side, the West — led by France — systematically tried to replace Minsk Agreements with the “Normandy format,” which put Russians and Ukrainians face-to-face. However, let’s remember there were never any Russian troops in the Donbass before 23-24 February 2022.
Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass before then. For example, the U.S. intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.
In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. This was exactly comparable to the Swiss who went to fight in Bosnia on weekends, in the 1990s, or the French who go to fight in Ukraine today.
Full article at link in Part One
Honestly, I think that the US toppled Saddam and dealt with Iraq the way it did to achieve its own perceived best interests. It actually had nothing to do with morality or the needs and wants of the Iraqis – though of course that’s how it was sold domestically.
What about killing Soleimani (on his way to peace talks with the Saudis) or nuclear scientists in Iran? Is the US (or the West) at war with Iran?
We’re not officially at war with them, but Iran is definitely at war with us.
How about unofficially?
Also Iran is exactly the kind of enemy that the US finds most useful.
Useful? How?
Indeed.
Similarly, the 20 year or so US/Europe/NATO involvement in Ukraine is about good old-fashioned geopolitical “sphere of influence” jostling of the kind that has been going on for centuries (i.e. for as long as there have been nation-states that got big enough to operate at the geopolitical scale). The “If we don’t help Ukrainians defend Democracy over there today, we’ll end up having to defend it over here tomorrow!” schtick is nothing more than (to paraphrase from “Mary Poppins”) the “spoonful of sugar” that “helps the medicine go down”. Putin, it bears mentioning, has to play according to those rules as well, of course. Hence, he has had to sell the war to his domestic audience as, say, a “denazification” project, etc..
Small and powerless. Not really a threat, but a great reason to spend money.
-The Swiss have tried to avoid the reality of conflict so as to not agree to let others transfer Swiss made weapons. Excuses such as this man makes help the Swiss avoid facing the issues.
-You neglected to mention 2 of the main leaders of the separatists were Russian military intelligence & FSB officers- not exactly home grown leaders and that Russian special forces were involved from the start….see Igor Girkin & Igor Belzer.
-even in Luhansk & Donetsk Oblast the support for union with Russia was a minority in polls conducted before the uprising (since then with Russia in control no one can trust the polls):
Support for a union between Russia and Ukraine was found to be much higher in certain areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_pro-Russian_unrest_in_Ukraine):
Thank you for posting this.
Exactly the reverse-we are the enemies the mullahs need to justify their autocracy. No one ever claims “I need emergency power b/c Luxembourg is threatening us”! The US is the nation most autocrats claim is after their country b/c few other nations are powerful enough to be at all believable. The mullahs need an enemy to justify their misrule- just like the Lenin & Stalin needed the capitalist countries & Kulaks & the Nazis needed the Jews & Bolsheviks . Without a credible enemy it is hard to centralize power & get you hands on the loot (just like the left wants a climate emergency).
Let’s say you need each other.
Poor old ex Colonel Jacques Baud must have put his retirement into FTX b/c he has fallen from gigs on Russian state TV to interviews on a website (sott net) where the boss (Laura Knight-Jadczyk) channels the cassiopeaeans for information. Sott net even named Vladimir Putin man of the year for 2022 for standing up to the global tyrants & defending humanity!
Even the dailysceptic thinks the retired Colonel is peddling garbage:
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/05/22/how-accurate-is-jacques-bauds-analysis-of-the-war-in-ukraine/
Now you are just being ridiculous. The U.S. finds a foreign enemy just so it can spend money?? We don’t need enemies for that. We’ve got endless welfare cases and illegal aliens and millions of pork projects that give our politicians excuses to spend money.
But it’s more difficult to funnel money to missile-producers etc, based on welfare and illegal aliens.
What an excellent point!
We still had journalism in the days leading up to the March 2003 shock and awe campaign against the people of Iraq. So we still has some transparency about what was going to occur.
For example, prior to the actual invasion, we found out how heavily involved American businesses would be from the get go.
The San Francisco Chronicle detailed what parts of Iraq’s infrastructure would be blown to pieces and which American corporations had been awarded the rights to go in and be the new fixture for that part of Iraqi people’s needs.
For example: communication, via telephone and cell phone technology. Iraqi’s company was to be destroyed. Motorola was given the rights of being the new communication corporation.
Same with sanitation of water and all facilities needed to accomplish that. Electrical power for the major and minor cities taken out.
American wars are always a smorgasbord of delightful profits for those “patriots” who don’t do more than buy whichever Senator they need to help them run their business in the most profitable means possible.
Not such a delight for the civilians in the nation which we have chosen as an enemy. And certainly not a delight for the grunts on the ground wearing an American uniform.
He was a criminal terrorist. Absolutely he was an open target. Just like any criminal hiding out who refuses to face justice.
You’re absolutely right. The U.S., as a whole, certainly doesn’t need to keep conjuring up new foreign enemies in order to justify its overall federal government spending levels on all sorts of things. It’s just a portion of the U.S. that needs to do that (especially since the end of the Cold War): the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961.
Considering I Googled the number 10 seconds before posting it means it is impossible for me to “love to keep repeating” it. The number I looked up was deaths *after* Saddam, not before. Your provided link implies you are befuddled.
Saddam died in 2003. Iraq was a mess before and has been a mess afterwards. We know he brutally suppressed the majority Shia population and the Kurds. We know his death and the war unleashed a civil war that killed a lot of people. We cannot know the counterfactual, but I presume that a better plan could have prevented a lot of infighting.
I’ll say that I sure got things wrong. I thought that Germany would pressure Ukraine and Russia into some kind of peace deal last spring. That did not happen. Perhaps it was never possible. Perhaps other, stronger influences had other plans. In fact, it seems like every country in EurAsia is angling for a benefit.
Of possible interest:
https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1997/11/the-last-empire